


The Deserter

by Ovipositivity



Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Tragedy, Bar Room Brawl, Bombs, Drinking, F/M, Rebellion, Refugees, Riots, Romance, Slow Romance, The New Republic - Freeform, Tragedy, Tragic Romance, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-27
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:15:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 47,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24952192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ovipositivity/pseuds/Ovipositivity
Summary: "When the Imps were gone, the politics started. We were peacekeepers, protecting delegates, suppressing riots. Not what I signed up for."The Galactic Civil War has come to an end. The New Republic, born from the victory of the Rebel Alliance, is settling into its role as galactic caretaker. But while the war is over, the peace has not yet begun. On planets across the galaxy, the ashes of the old order sit uneasily beneath the foundations of the new one. Not everyone celebrated the fall of Palpatine.On the staunch Imperial planet of Capridor, a regiment of Republic shocktroopers has taken up garrison duty. It's an easy job-- no combat, no dangerous nighttime infiltrations, just patrolling and keeping the peace. But for Carasynthia Dune and her fellow soldiers, the danger has just begun. Capridor is old and rich, clinging to its traditions and its privileged place in the Empire. Will it ever be ready to the join the new Republic?
Relationships: Cara Dune/Original Character(s)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 7





	1. Welcome to Capridor

**Author's Note:**

> Carasynthia Dune lived for the Rebellion. She believed in the cause so strongly she had it tattooed on her face. But when the Mandalorian meets her on Sorgan, she tells him she turned her back on the cause. Why? Because the assignment changed? Because she got bored?  
> No. Nobody leaves the Rebellion lightly. I wanted to know why Cara, a woman who clearly believed in justice and protecting the weak, would desert from her commitments. I wrote to find out, and now I know.

From orbit, Capridor looked as peaceful as any other planet. Rolling green continents, their coasts curling outward in lazy peninsulas and playful fjords. Icecaps at both ends. A vast blue ocean, dribbled with archipelagoes like emeralds set in blue satin. Stolid and dignified icecaps. Ponderous white clouds scudded gently across the sky like manor lords surveying their lands. Above even them, a string of satellites like silver beads on a chain wrapped the planet in an invisible web: mapping weather, sending messages, and greeting visitors from far-flung systems. Capridor was normally a welcoming place, and it wasn’t unusual to see nearspace cluttered with bulk haulers, pleasure yachts, and grand old starliners.

Not today. The Mon Cal cruiser _Mon Ekidna_ sat in low orbit. Its profile was gently rounded, not at all like the angular lines of a Star Destroyer, but with its gunports unshrouded it exuded a palpable aura of menace. Like a shark in the shallows, it had chased away the normal passenger traffic. The few ships remaining in-system flitted furtively in and out of orbit, as though tiptoeing to avoid _Mon Ekidna’s_ wrath.

Come, descend from orbit, past the satellites, through those lordly clouds, down and down and down. Now mountains claw at the sky. Now the oceans are not sheets of blue but rolling fields of iron-grey water and spraying white foam. Now the green of the land is mixed with the brown and grey of fields and cities. Vast old-growth forests sprawl across the landscape. Cities spring up, some bright and glittering, some dull and smothered under the smog of industry. Rivers wind their way ribbon-like down from the mountains and cut through the forests, dividing the land into a patchwork quilt. Follow one of those rivers, the mightiest, from its headwaters in the alpine heights of the Betarik range, down through the foothills, across the rolling prairie, and into the dense green thicket of the Forest of Guf. Follow it through the forest and down to the coast, where it spreads into a wide, shallow delta before joining the sea. Around this delta, clinging to the coast like a limpet, is Capridor City, the largest and most beautiful of the planet’s cities. 

See its ivory towers! The Kingsveld, with its ancient statutes! The cobbled roads, artfully preserved from the Old Republic era! The wooden piers that extend out over the river, festooned with colorful speedboats and shrimping trawlers! Capridor City is the not just the largest but the _oldest_ of Capridor’s settlements, and it wears its past like a mantle. On the highest hill, the Palazza can see all the way down to the oceanside. The rest of the city is just as grand: stone towers, slate roofs, hand-painted wooden signs advertising garment-mending or cold drinks. And, leaning against one of those towers, two troopers wearing the starbird of the Rebel Alliance-that-was, now the fledging New Republic.

“This is the _life!_ ” Carasynthia Dune stretched her arms theatrically over her head and crossed them behind her head. Next to her, Pell Rutledge smirked and shook his head. He did not answer right away, but withdrew the stub-end of a hand-rolled cigarra from behind his ear and made a show of lighting it with a wooden match.

“Come on!” Cara said, jostling him with one elbow. “Don’t tell me you don’t love it.” She laughed out loud—a belly laugh, honest, with no pretension. She had impressive lung capacity for laughing: a stocky woman, with broad shoulders and wide hips, imposing even without her armor. Her black hair had just started to grow out from its deployment-regulation cut, and she swept a handful if it back out of her eyes.

Next to her, Pell took a deep drag on his cigarra. He stood a few inches taller than Cara, but much thinner, with narrow arms and sleek legs like a prize racing hound. His chin was stubbled with the kind of beard shadow that would have earned him a strict dressing down from an Alliance drill sergeant just a month before. He held in the smoke for a moment, then let it trickle out of his nostrils and the corners of his lips. “It’s alright,” he allowed. His voice was low and gravelly, though whether that was from the smoking or the blaster bolt to the neck he’d taken in the evacuation from Dantooine, Cara could not have said.

Cara shook her head again and pushed herself off the wall. “Alright, he says,” she replied, her voice full of scorn. “Do you know what I did yesterday? I took a shit indoors. Indoors! Have you ever heard of such a thing?” She set off down the cobbled street at a leisurely walk.

Pell fell in step next to her. He puffed at his stub-end and blew out another thin cloud. “Fancy that,” he replied. “Look who thinks she’s Princess Organa. Shitting inside and all.”

Cara laughed again. Pell knew what she was talking about, he was just being difficult. “I mean… nobody’s shooting at us, Pell. Do you know how long it’s been since I went on a deployment where nobody shot at me? And the food! I’m starting to actually remember what real food tastes like! And I don’t have to hump a whole pack full of gear with me like in the dropper days. I can just leave it all in the barracks. Oh, that’s another thing! A barracks! With a bed!”

“Yeah, yeah.” Pell finished his cigarra with one last tug and flicked away the butt. “They’re not shooting at us, but not ‘cause they don’t want to. Do you see the looks we get?” He gestured up ahead. They were approaching an intersection, and a half-dozen peddlers had set up stalls around its edges to form an impromptu market. A tall man in a smart blue suit was talking to one of the peddlers, by the look of it negotiating the price on a roast fowl.

At the sight of the approaching troopers, though, both men fell silent. The peddler ducked backwards, as though hoping to hide behind his wares. The man in the suit glared at the two of them with undisguised hatred. The rest of the vendors, too, seemed fixated on the new arrivals, watching them with the cagey attitude of prey uncertain whether to run or go to ground. Cara nodded amicably at the bird vendor and his customer, but neither acknowledged her. They simply stared at her until she passed through the intersection and out the far side. The whole time, Cara could feel the tall man’s eyes staring vibroblades in the back of her neck.

Only when they were safely in the shadow of another tower did she relax and let out the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Her hand strayed to her belt and the comforting weight of her blaster. Pell already held his and was fiddling with the dial. He turned to her and nodded glumly. “They hate us, Cara. We’re occupiers.”

“We’re liberators,” she protested. “They should be thanking us. We set them free. And they were pretty lucky. You saw what happened on Elran.”

“Well, maybe High Command had the right idea on Elran,” Pell said darkly. “After a bombardment like that, nobody doubts that the Republic means business. Capridor got its hair mussed, but some of the people here think they gave up too easily.”

“Oh, come off it, Pell,” Cara said. “There’s gonna be an adjustment period, but they’ll get used to us. We’re not taxing them into the ground the way the Empire did. We’re not drafting their sons to be Stormtroopers.”

“Yeah, well, you try telling them that,” Pell said, jerking his head back towards the intersection and its merchants. “They don’t love having a curfew, either. They’re proud, the Capridorians.”

“I think they’re just unimaginative,” Cara replied. “I mean… we’re here in Capridor City, on Capridor, next to the Capridor River, fronting the Bay of Capridor. What street is this? Capridor Street? Or Capridor Avenue, maybe?” She giggled. “Maybe they’re just afraid we’re going to rename stuff and they’ll have to remember more than one word.”

“Oh yeah?” Pell gave her a sly smile. “What would you name this street? Cara Lane?”

“Naw, this is Skywalker Ave. Cara Lane is two streets over that way.” She indicated with her head.

Pell looked at her quizzically. “Why’s that?”

“Because that’s where that bar I like is.” Cara grinned. “That little side alley next to it can be Pell Street.”

Pell wrinkled his nose. “That alley smells like piss all the time.”

She clapped him on the back. “Perfect!”

Smiling, shaking his head, Pell matched her stride. “Look, I guess I’ll admit it beats being shot at. But at least on deployment, we knew who the enemies were, and we were allowed to shoot at ‘em. Here, I feel like I have to watch my back all the time. You hear partisans blew up a Tortoise the other day?”

Cara hadn’t. “I thought they didn’t have that kind of artillery anymore?” she asked. The TR-9 Armored Transport was the Republic’s go-to platform for ground deployments. Like their namesake, Tortoises were slow but nearly impenetrable to small arms fire.

“Some kind of buried mine, on a road up in the highlands,” Pell said. “Nobody died, thank the Force, but the thing’s scrapped. There’s people here who haven’t gotten the message that the war’s over.”

Cara’s hand closed on the butt of her blaster and her face hardened. “Well, if anyone in Capridor City needs reminding, we’ll do it. But come on, Pell, it’s just a bunch of pissed-off burghers and out-of-work lumberjacks here. Once the sector calms down a little and traffic resumes, the economy will pick back up and then people will be too _busy_ to hate us.”

Pell shrugged. “Maybe you’re right. This just isn’t the kind of work I signed up for, you know?”

“Yeah, I remember, you told the recruiter ‘make sure you only give me suicide missions where I have to crap in a hole in the woods,’” Cara said. “Lighten up a little. Place is pretty enough, isn’t it?” As she spoke, the two of them emerged from the shadow of a bell tower into the city’s massive central plaza. Capridor City was organized in a hub-and-spoke pattern centered, not on the Palazza, but on this square: the Kingsveld, a massive marble expanse covered in fountains, benches, and delicately manicured flowerbeds. And of course the Kings themselves. Ten statues, each more than thirty meters tall, ringed the plaza. Each of them held some item: a set of scales, a sword, a net, an axe.

Cara supposed they were probably wonderfully symbolic to the people of Capridor. To her, they looked a little too much like the statues in the Valley of Memory on Alderaan. She’d loved visiting there as a child, climbing between the massive marble toes. All gone now, vanished with the rest of her homeworld, and seeing their likeness here made her homesick and wistful.

If Pell noticed her melancholy, he was too polite to say anything. The two of them strolled through the plaza at an easy pace, passing through the kings’ great shadows. Pell craned his neck to look upwards. “Yeah, I guess it has its charms,” he allowed. “A lot of history here. Not like at home.”

“Aren’t you from a proud line of dirt farmers?” Cara asked him. “You know, carrying on a great tradition of producing high-quality dirt?”

“ _Moisture_ farmers,” Pell replied, but without any real animosity. “It’s an important job, you know. People count on—”

“You! Rebs!” The voice caught both of their attention and put them instantly on guard. There was no humor in it, no playfulness. Cara turned to see an elderly man striding across the plaza towards her. He wore a black bombazine jacket and a matching skullcap, with a scarf twisted around his neck and thrown over one shoulder. In one hand he carried a lacquered wood walking stick, which he shook at them as he walked. He had a drooping white moustache, which was currently twisted in a grimace. “How dare you show your faces in this place!” he shouted. “Have you no shame?”

Pell raised his gun, but did not point it at the old man. He seemed to get the message all the same and came to a halt about three meters away, seething and staring at them. “And now you threaten an old man,” he spat, shaking his head. “Despicable. You Rebels really are a pack of louts.”

“Nobody’s threatening you, sir,” Cara said. She opened her arms and showed him her empty palms. “We’re just trying to go home safe at the end of the day.”

“Home? This isn’t your home!” The man looked her up and down. Whatever he saw seemed to displease him. “I wish you would all go back to your home and leave us be! Capridor is an Imperial planet. Now, and forever!”

“Ease off, gramps,” Pell said. His fingers tightened around the grip of his blaster. “You’ve said your piece. Now beat it before we arrest you.”

Cara looked around. Their little tableaux was starting to attract attention. Just looky-loos for now, but she put her hand on her own blaster anyways.

“Arrest me?” The old man’s eyes widened in indignation. “On what charge, you brute?”

“Disturbing the peace. Now get on home.” Pell’s eyes were flinty, two hard little chips of stone. The old man stared at him, but either his nerve failed him, or he had said all he meant to say. He turned and walked away, leaning heavily on his stick. He looked much older all of a sudden, much more worn. The spectators turned away to their own private errands.

The old Capridorian hesitated. “Young man,” he called. His voice was clear, without any of its former anger. Now he just sounded resigned. Pell turned back to look at him.

“Yes?”

“Capridor endures!” Without waiting for an answer, the old man pulled his scarf tighter around his hunched shoulders and walked away across the plaza.

“What was _that_ about?” Cara asked as soon as they were out of earshot. The whole exchange had left her rattled. Pell just sighed.

“I told you, Cara. They hate us. Especially the rich ones. I bet Uncle Capridor back there lost a bundle when the Imperial machine here went up in smoke. That’s what this is about, not some kind of patriotic feeling.” He shook his head. “’Capridor endures.’ Really? I guess it’s genteel, at least.”

“Don’t let it get to you, Pell,” Cara said. She was trying not to let it get to _her_ , either. The venom in the old man’s voice! Like she’d killed his tooka! “He’s just a bitter old asshole. He’s not representative.”

“Eh, whatever,” Pell said. He thumbed the safety catch on his blaster back on and slotted it back into its holster. “I don’t mind if they hate me. I don’t even mind if they spit, as long as none of it gets in my mouth. I just don’t want them to think they can cut up rough with Republic troops and get away with it.”

“They won’t,” Cara said. “This place is pretty peaceful. I think we’re just in for a rough adjustment period, is all.”

“Hope you’re right,” Pell replied, in a tone that made it clear he thought she wasn’t. “I’m heading back to the barracks. Shift’s over. You coming?”

“In a bit,” Cara replied. “I think I’ll take the scenic route. I like walking around outside without having to duck blaster bolts, you know?”

Pell shrugged. “Suit yourself. Stay safe out here, ok?”

“I always do.” Cara laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. “Take Cara Street back. We’ll go out for drinks later.”

“Don’t get caught.” Pell smiled at her and sketched a jaunty salute.

“Don’t get caught!”

Cara watched Pell’s retreating back and idly fingered the grip of her blaster. She tried to put his words out of her mind. Nobody was shooting at her, and nobody would. Not here, in the middle of a historic district; not now, on a beautiful spring day, with the air full of the smell of coralbine and lavodendron. So what if a few old fogies wanted to yell at her about the good old days? Soon enough, that old bastard would be meeting the Emperor he missed so much. In Hell.

Once Pell was gone, she set off on a leisurely stroll. A dozen treelined avenues split off from the Kingsveld, and she picked one at random. She wasn’t due back at the barracks for an hour or two, and she had her commlink. She wanted to explore. Capridor City’s people might have some unwarranted nostalgia for the Empire, but their pride in their city was well-deserved. Every storefront had an elaborate façade. Every sidewalk was neatly maintained, with jobi trees growing at regular intervals. Tiny botanist droids scurried between the trees with pruning shears, watering cans and nutrient paste dispensers. They beeped indignantly as Cara stepped over and around them.

She saw a few other people, most of them taking in the fresh air as she was, but they gave her a wide berth. Cara didn’t care. None of them looked as hostile as the old man had been, only wary and frightened. Their world had turned upside down in recent weeks, and soon enough this would just become the new normal. Cara’s stomach rumbled, and she decided to go looking for something to eat. Capridor had its share of fine restaurants, but most of them were still closed and locked up tight. That business would return too, Cara was sure. In the meantime she’d find a hovertruck. One could hardly walk down a street around here without being accosted by a merchant selling braised orlaj flank on a stick or fresh ronto wraps.

At least, on every street but this one. She turned left and passed through a narrow alley. High overhead, washing lines criss-crossed between balconies. She could hear distant conversations through the open windows, and the shrieking laughter of children. City sounds. Comfortable sounds.

The other end of the alley opened out onto a wide, cobbled street with buildings on one side. The other side was open to the forest. Cara searched her memory to try to remember its name. Capridor Forest, probably. Long ago, Capridor City had sprung up around the delta, where timber from upriver could be cut into the fine, strong capwood the planet was famous for. Even today, she knew, the people of Capridor maintained a proud woodcutting tradition. They showed their veneration of the forest by letting it intrude on their perfectly manicured city. She approved. Alderaan had been the same: nature and mankind, in perfect balance.

The wind whispered through the capwood trees overhead, filling the air with the susurrus of shaking leaves. With it came a faint scent: sweet, with a woody undernote, like old and well-preserved leather. Cara drew in a deep breath and held it. On top of not being shot at, this assignment was just _pleasant_. She’d smelled enough mud and blood for a lifetime. _I could get used to this_ , she thought. _Settle down, open a little shop… Cara’s Cakes?_ She tried to picture herself in a chef’s toque and snorted with laughter. _Nah, after this it’ll be on to some new planet. Enjoy it while you can, Cara._

To her left, the street curved gently away past rows of townhouses and shops. To her right, the ground sloped abruptly down into a shallow ravine. The unbroken forest filled her vision to the horizon. She walked for five minutes or so, keeping her eyes peeled for a food stand, when something caught her attention.

She paused. There it was again. Speech? Laughter? It was hard to make out, but definitely some kind of human sound. And it was coming from the forest. She pulled up short and listened. Somewhere ahead and to her right, twigs snapped. She heard someone hissing urgently, and the voices fell silent. All at once, the foreboding feeling from earlier crept back. She grabbed her blaster, but did not draw it yet. Instead she slunk forward in a half-crouch. All of her stealth training came flooding back, as though she’d never left the battlefield. What had Pell called them? Partisans? Bushwhackers, saboteurs, it didn’t matter. Cara had _been_ one of them for long enough. She knew to be on her guard.

She crept into the ravine, keeping her head down, careful not to make too much noise. There, up ahead, the voices came again. They sounded high-pitched. Women? How many of them? Were they armed? It was probably nothing, but the Republic had deployed soldiers to Capridor for a reason. She’d just figure out what was going on, and if it was some revanchist plotters thinking they could hold their little scheming sessions in the woods, she’d show them how wrong they were. She drew her blaster and made sure it was set to Stun.

A few more feet, and she could see movement. Shadows danced. It looked energetic, perhaps sparring? Had she stumbled on some kind of training camp? She raised her gun and took a deep breath, then peered around the bole of a tree.

Someone had cleared the brush at the bottom of the ravine, creating a dirt-floored clearing about five meters across. A dozen children stood in a loose semi-circle. To Cara, who’d never been good at guessing these things, the youngest was about seven; the oldest, twelve or thirteen. All of them were covered in dirt and grass stains, and most of them carried sticks.

Right now, they were watching two of the older boys in silence. These two stood at the center of the circle, a few inches away from each other, bristling with obvious anger. One of them was short and stocky, with dark brown hair and long shorts. The other was taller, thinner, with a mane of wispy blonde and a spray of freckles across his cheeks.

“How come?” the shorter boy complained. “You _always_ get to be him!”

“Nuh uh,” the larger one replied. “It was Stevil last week. And Joss the week before. It’s my turn.”

“But I _hate_ being the Emperor. It’s _boring_.”

The taller boy chewed his lip thoughtfully. “How about you switch with Miles? He’ll be the Emperor and you be Major Hewex.”

One of the smaller boys at the edge of the ring looked like he was about to complain, but then his shoulders slumped and he nodded. The newly christened Hewex sighed. “Alright, fine,” he said, grumbling. The semi-circle of boys all nodded solemnly, as though some pact had been sealed, and began to break apart. The blonde clapped his shorter friend on the shoulder.

“You can be him next week, ok?” he said. “Promise.”

“Double swear?”

“Double swear.”

The boys took their places, scattered around the clearing. Cara found herself watching intently. Once the initial adrenaline wore off, she felt a little foolish. To think she’d gotten so worked up over a bunch of kids! Pell was really getting to her. And maybe being yelled at by the old man had affected her more than she wanted to admit. But she had to admit that she was a bit curious about what she’d stumbled onto. The boys looked like actors rehearsing for a play.

The first part of their game was familiar from Cara’s own childhood: lots of running around, shouting, and pantomiming blaster rifles with sticks. “Pew pew!” shouted the little Major Hewex, and his “troops” echoed him. “Pew pew!” Boys would sprawl over in the dirt, yelling theatrically, then get back up to run around some more. Cara couldn’t help but smile at the scene. She made sure to pull back into the brush—she didn’t want them to spot her and prematurely end their little game.

Soon enough, the scene shifted. Most of the soldiers on both sides retreated to the flanks, leaving the center clear. A couple of the boys carried out a tree stump, huffing and puffing under its weight, and set it down in the middle of the clearing. The little one who had been forced to trade roles sat on it and set his face in a grimace. He made a pretty good Emperor, Cara decided, even if he didn’t care for the part.

A gangly, red-headed youth swaggered out of the treeline towards the ersatz Emperor, holding his stick in two hands like a sword. “I’ve come to kill you, Emperor Palpatine!” he shouted, growling angrily. “Surrender now or I’ll chop your head off!”

The boy on the stump turned around and widened his eyes. “Luke Starkiller!” he exclaimed. “No, don’t kill me! Let’s end this war! We can all be friends.”

“No!” bellowed the redhead, swinging his stick around in wild arcs. “I’m going to kill you, and then I’ll be the Emperor! And then I’ll kill everyone!”

The blonde boy stepped out from the trees on the other side of the clearing. At some point, he’d put on a long black cape. It had a homemade look to it, and fluttered out behind him in the breeze. He held up his own stick one-handed like a fencer’s sabre. “Not so fast, Luke Starkiller!” he exclaimed in a voice more fitting a holodrama lead. “I’ll stop you!”

“Darth Vader!” the redhead snarled. He stumbled backwards, almost tripping over his own feet, and held up his own stick-sword in a defensive stance. The boys standing around the edge of the clearing gasped and applauded as their Darth Vader stepped forward. He moved with confidence, displaying none of the adolescent awkwardness of his counterpart. Cara’s face, unseen, twisted into a frown. _What the hell?_

“I’ll give you one last chance, Starkiller,” the blonde boy said. “Put down your sword and leave us alone. You can have half the galaxy and we’ll have the other half. What do you say?” He pitched his voice down as he spoke, and for a moment, his voice sent a chill up Cara’s spine. The effect was rather spoiled when his voice cracked on the last syllable of “galaxy,” but he rallied and pressed on. By the end of his speech he was standing between the stump, with its terrified emperor, and “Luke Starkiller.”

“I say… never!” the redhead replied, and charged forward with his sword at the ready. “Die!”

The two of them were quickly locked in mortal combat. Cara noted that they seemed more intent on hitting each other’s sticks than each other directly. Both of them made loud humming and crackling noises, and the ring of boys around the edge of the clearing echoed them. “Fzzz! Pzow! KSSSSH!” The air filled with the clatter of stick on stick. Cara watched them fight for about thirty seconds. With a massive swing, “Vader” knocked “Luke’s” sword right out of his hands. Instantly the red-headed boy fell to his knees, clutching an imaginary wound in his side.

“No!” he howled. “Curse you, Emperor! Curse you, Darth Vader! Now I’ll—ACK!” He toppled over onto his back and stuck his tongue out of his mouth, then lay still. The tall blonde boy made a show of hanging his stick back on his belt, then pulled his cape around himself. “Come on, my lord!” he said to the Emperor. “We have to run away before his friends blow up our space station! Let’s take my shuttle. We can go to Capridor and hide there.”

The rest of the boys clapped and cheered. “Vader!” they chanted, and “Jayden!” Even the deceased Luke got up and dusted himself off to join in the cheers. “Good job, Jayden!” he said. “That’s how it should have been!”

The blonde boy clasped hands with his former adversary. “You’re a great Luke, Wilhuf,” he said. “Really scary.”

“Ah, thanks,” the former Luke replied. He grinned sheepishly. “I just don’t like always being the bad guy.”

Cara had seen enough. She stood up and pushed her way through the brush. Every head swiveled towards her at once, and the children froze. A couple of them dropped their sticks with a clatter that resounded in the sudden silence. One of the smaller boys started to cry.

“What are you children up to?” Cara asked. As openers went, she had to admit it lacked a certain something, but she had never been good with kids. None of them answered her. She surveyed the row of dirty faces. They all looked positively terrified of her, though some of the older ones mixed that fear in with hatred. The blonde boy, particularly, the one who had played as Darth Vader, stared at her with undisguised loathing.

“A-are you going to shoot us?” asked the redheaded boy. Cara looked down and realized that she was still holding her gun.

“Shit!” she cried, and jammed it back into her hip holster. “No! I’m not going to shoot anyone. What’s going on out here? Why aren’t you boys in school?”

“School still closed cause’a the war,” said one of the littler boys, a round-faced ruffian wearing an Imperial Navy cap at least three sizes too big for him. “We’re playin’.”

“Well… do your parents know you’re out in the woods?” Cara asked. She felt doubly foolish, first for being drawn out into the woods chasing a bunch of kids, and second for letting their stupid game get to her. Who cared what a pack of Imp brats thought?

“My parents told me not to talk to rebs,” said the blonde boy—Jayden, she remembered. His voice was full of adolescent defiance. He crossed his arms against his chest and scowled at her.

Cara tried a different tack. “You know,” she said, crouching down until their faces were level, “that’s not a very nice thing to call someone. I’m not trying to be your enemy, here.”

“All rebs are enemies,” Jayden said. “Just leave us alone. Leave our _planet_ alone.”

Cara gawked at him. She wondered briefly if this child knew the old man from earlier. Pell’s words flashed across her mind. _They hate us_. Was it really all of them, Cara wondered, or was she just having an unlucky day?

Whatever the answer, her patience had run out. “Alright, kids, you’ve had your fun,” she said. “Beat it. Go on home.” She made a shooing motion with both hands. “Go on, get out of here.”

Most of them took the hint right away and ran, leaving their sticks behind. Some of the older boys took a little longer to leave. They huddled in a little knot, muttering darkly and occasionally looking over their shoulders at her. Cara stood firm and frowned as fiercely as she could. She made sure to keep her hand off her gun. They were just dumb kids, after all. She didn’t want to terrify them.

Jayden turned back at the edge of the clearing. He looked like he had something to say. It took him a moment to gather up his courage, looking Cara up and down. He swallowed and managed a shaky squawk of defiance.

“Capridor endures!”

With that, he was gone, vanishing with his friends into the brush. Cara sighed and shook her head. Even the kids on this Force-damned planet were a pain in the ass. And she was still starving.

She made her way back to the barracks by a roundabout route. The forest road had been a bust, so this time she walked along the river. In more peaceful times, this had been a beautiful route. The riverwalk was made of square blocks of polished granite, forming a wide promenade dotted with benches and flowerboxes. A wrought-iron fence lined the walk on the river side, broken occasionally by staircases that led down to the jetty. Cara stood by the fence for a moment, admiring the view. She could see boats far below: pleasure skiffs in red and green and candyfloss pink, brightly painted shrimping trawlers, hovering airboats for traversing the marshy delta. On the far side of the river, primeval forest stretched away to the horizon. It looked like a fairy-tale forest, a place of myths and monsters.

Normally, Cara supposed, this place would be swarming with playing children, dreamy young couples, and old people feeding the forkbills. Especially now, with the setting sun casting a blanket of fire across the river, it was easy enough to imagine the promenade bustling with life, busking musicians and shouting merchants filling the air with noise.

It was quiet at the moment, mostly deserted apart from Cara. The shops that lined the city side of the promenade were all closed down. Some of them had been chained shut. Cara could see a few other walkers, but they were all solitary, and they gave her a wide berth.

Not all of the merchants had vanished. A savory smell wafted into Cara’s nostrils and drew her deeper down the promenade. Up ahead, a semi-circular kiosk topped with a bright red canopy stood against the fence. Cara ambled over, following the smell. The kiosk had been set up around a grill, on which sizzled a half-dozen thumb-sized shrimp. A steel counter ringed the grill, bare except for a box of napkins and a few scattered stains. A man, his back to Cara, bent over the grill, shaking seasoning onto the shrimp and turning them over with a long fork. The loud sizzle of cooking meat disguised her approach—either that, or he was simply so intent on what he was doing that he didn’t notice her. Cara stepped up to the semi-circular counter and rapped her knuckles against it.

The man standing over the grill spun around in surprise. He dropped his fork, groped madly for it, and managed to catch it again in midair. Only then did he look up at his visitor. “Oh!” he said, his eyes wide. “Oh, I’m sorry, ma’am! You gave me a real start!”

Cara looked him up and down. He was a tall man, made taller by the hat he wore—a sort of brimmed cap that puffed up at least ten centimeters above his forehead. His face was slim, with a pointed chin and high cheekbones that gave him an aristocratic look. His expression was warm and inviting, though, with none of the hostility she’d seen from other Capridorians. He wore a long and heavily stained apron that had perhaps once been white. His forearms were bare, and Cara could see tattoos winding up both sleeves: sea serpents, giant cats, all kinds of animals real and mythical, all wound in and around each other. He carefully set the long fork down on the counter and then held out his hands. “What can I do for you, ma’am?”

“What are you cooking?” Cara asked. Whatever it was, it smelled heavenly.

“Ah, those would be fresh pearl shrimp, seasoned with koklav and a little Byriun pepper,” he smiled back at her. “My own secret recipe.”

“How fresh?” Cara leaned one elbow on the stand and propped her chin up in it. She wasn’t much of a shellfish eater, but right now she was hungry enough to take whatever she could get.

“I just caught ‘em myself, ma’am,” the man replied with a wink. He pointed down to where a cluster of boats clung to the edge of one of the jetties. “That’s my boat down there, the _Adorned Lady_.”

Cara couldn’t figure out which boat he was pointing to, and anyways, they all looked the same to her. “How much for… one?” she asked.

The salesman produced a wooden stick from somewhere under the counter. “Ah, one decicred each, ma’am. But I bet you won’t be able to stop at one.” He grabbed his fork and, with a flourish, impaled one of the shrimp on the end of the stick. “Here you go. Mind you take a napkin now, they’re messy.”

Cara ignored his proffered napkin and bit directly into the soft meat of the shrimp. Juice shot out and dribbled down her chin. Her eyes widened as she chewed. Ignoring the juice, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and swallowed.

“This is pretty good,” she allowed. In truth, it was better than that. The flavor was savory, with a slightly citrusy aftertaste that lingered on her tongue. Her stomach growled, demanding more. “This is _really_ good.”

The shrimp-seller beamed. “Ah, I knew it!” he said. “Nobody can eat just one of my patented Twice-Seasoned Shrimp. Nobody. Shall I get you another?”

Cara plunked a one-credit coin down on the countertop. “Keep ‘em coming,” she said, and bit into her meal again. He scooped up her coin and made it disappear into some compartment below the countertop, then busied himself transferring shrimp from the grill to the wooden skewers. By the time Cara had finished her first, he offered her two more skewers, each bearing five shrimp.

“First one’s free,” he said, beaming. “Call it a sampler.”

Cara shrugged and grabbed the two sticks, along with a handful of napkins. Shrimp juice was already soaking into her uniform, but she didn’t care. What a find! She’d have to remember this place.

“So, what brings you to Capridor?” the shrimpman said, leaning against his counter and waggling his eyebrows. Cara smiled despite herself and rolled her eyes.

“You know, I think you’re the first person I’ve met today who doesn’t hate me?” she asked. “Or doesn’t hate the Republic, at least. What’s your problem?”

He shrugged. “Your money spends, at least,” he replied. “No point in hating you. It’s not like you’d leave if I did.”

“Well, I wish more of you people had your attitude,” Cara sighed. “Thanks for the shrimp, Mr…”

“Yannik,” he said, extending one hand. “Yannik Raow.”

“Cara Dune,” Cara replied, shaking it. “Stay safe, Yannik.”

“You too, Cara.” He smiled at her, then reached down to grab some fresh shrimp out from beneath the counter. Cara walked away, stopping every few steps to bite into another shrimp. She could already feel her hunger receding. By the time she was halfway to the barracks, she’d eaten every last bite, and the sun was just disappearing beneath the horizon. She cleaned off her face with the last of the napkins, let out a happy belch, and went inside.

Pell was already there, of course, lying on his back with a handheld viewscreen held up over his head. By the look of it, he was watching fathier racing—and if Cara knew him, he had money riding on the race. He barely looked up as Cara walked in.

“You have fun on your walk?” he asked. “Nobody shot at you?”

Cara shook her head. “Nah. Maybe next time.” She dropped into her bunk and let herself fall backward. “You make bank on the fathiers?”

Pell shook his head and tossed the viewscreen down with a disgusted look on his face. “Maybe next time. Nah, scratch that. Capridor City will throw us a big We Love the Republic parade before I win big.”

Cara stared at the ceiling, remembering her conversation with Yannik. “Well, you never know,” she said. “Could happen.”


	2. Honor Guard

It had been years since Cara Dune had owned any civilian clothes. She’d gotten used to her uniform, and the armored bodysuits that were standard issue on Dropper missions were like a second skin. But she didn’t think she’d ever, ever learn to love the Republic Guard dress uniform.

It had _braid_. It had _epaulets_. It had a starched collar, so stiff and sharp that she was afraid she’d cut her own head off if she tried to turn around too fast. And the trousers… well, the less said about them, the better, except that they had those huge puffs around the thigh that made the wearer look like she was smuggling R2 units in her pockets. At least she was allowed to carry a gun.

There was nothing for it, though. His Honor the Governor-General, Juibla Kerskyan, was still at least a week away, so Lord Rictor Tovelt was still the face of the Republic on Capridor. Personally, Cara thought he was a toad, but he was a toad who’d seen the way the wind was blowing before any of his peers in the Legislature. His flexible loyalties had seen him rewarded with the position of Acting Governor, and the Republic garrison had been pressed into service as his honor guard. And Lord Tovelt was a man who knew the importance of an impressive-looking honor guard.

“Cheer up, Cara,” Pell whispered. He was standing next to her, close enough that they could carry on a whispered conversation. He, too, had been pressed into the dress uniform, though he managed to make his look rakish. “Could be worse. I heard the early drafts of the woman’s dress uniform had a skirt.”

Cara made a rude gesture back at him, but subtly. The two of them stood in the middle of the row to Tovelt’s left. He’d gone all out today: a full two dozen Republic Guard troops, plus an armored personnel carrier, parked unsubtly in front of the fountain outside the Palazza. All of the worthies filing in to hear his speech had to walk past the ugly, boxy vehicle. The message was clear: you’d better listen to me. My friends have big guns and short tempers.

If it had been up to Cara, Republic troops would have more important things to do than act as the punctuation to some sweaty grasper’s speech, but nobody had asked her. Lord Tovelt was obviously taking advantage of his temporary good fortune to settle some old scores. Not that you’d know it from the content of his speech: he droned on and on about “freedom from the shackles of fear” and “a new golden age of opportunity” and “the need for all Capridorians to join hands so that we can walk together into a bright new future.”

His conciliatory tone did not seem to be winning him any friends in the crowd. The legislature normally met here, and in front of the dais, tiered rows of benches climbed towards the back of the room. Today, their occupants looked less than pleased to be called into session. Cara looked from face to face, seeing emotions that ran the gamut from “frustrated rage” to “enraged frustration.” A few—too few—of Tovelt’s Republic-supporting friends sat and smiled in the front rows, clapping during his many pauses for applause, but most of the luminaries of Capridor were not having it. Way up in the back rows, Cara could see a few other whispered conversations going on. She was willing to bet that they were a lot more serious than her and Pell’s.

“And so, my friends,” Tovelt said, sighing and clasping his hands together, “it brings me great joy to announce that soon Capridor will be welcomed fully to the bosom of the fledging New Republic. We will take our seat in the Senate on Hosnian Prime, and there work to guide this ship of state on its exciting and illustrious voyage. Why, that reminds me of an old tale I learned at my mother’s knee, lo these many years ago…”

Cara sighed. He’d been talking for an hour and a half already. Her bladder had been politely trying to get her attention for the last twenty minutes, and she was afraid that soon it would stop being polite. She shifted from foot to foot. Pell saw her distress and grinned.

“Want a bottle, Cara?” he whispered. “I think I have one in my satchel…”

“Eat bantha dung!” she hissed back at him.

“You should have gone before we left,” he chided, not even trying to hold back his smirk.

Cara pointedly ignored him. Instead, she looked up at the ceiling. She had to admit it was beautiful—high, vaulted arches, mosaic tiles, and huge frescoes depicting the founding of Capridor and other historical scenes of note. Huge kings, the mirrors of the ones standing outside in the Kingsveld, led their people with sword and torch and, at least in one instance, lightsaber. Cara tried to distract herself hunting for details. Her gaze swept across the ceiling, across the balustraded viewing gallery, across the acres of velvet curtain that lined the walls. Anything, anything she could find to distract from the urgent need to pee.

Her eyes went to the windows. Six of them lined the hall on each side, gigantic confections of gilt-edged glass that rose from floor to towering ceiling. Early-afternoon sunlight slanted in through the windows, drawing squares of light on the floor. Outside, Cara could see boats chugging along the river, and beyond them, the fuzzy green blanket of the forest. She wondered if the boys from yesterday were playing their stupid game in the woods again. She wondered if the shrimp seller she had talked to was out there, catching tonight’s dinner.

She wondered what that dark shape was. Movement caught her eye, and she had about a second’s warning. Just a second, but that was more than enough. In combat, you often had a lot less than a second to spot danger and react. By the time the window broke, Cara was already moving. She crossed the distance between herself and Lord Tovelt in three quick strides, ignoring his shouts of protest and the murmurs of surprise from the audience. She dropped her useless gun and heard it clatter to the ground. Glass shards spiraled in the air, twinkling lazily, moving as slowly as if caught in treacle. Cara ignored them. She only had eyes for the descending object: oblong, gunmetal grey, about the size of her two fists together. A thermal detonator. Armed—she could see, with preternatural clarity, the winking green telltale on its side. Was it timed or impact-fused? If it was the latter, she was dead no matter what she did.

The rest of the honor guard saw it too, but their movements were slow, uncoordinated. Perhaps living on this planet had made them soft. The audience, lacking their training, did not know enough to panic yet. They rose in confusion, squawking and staring. Cara ignored them. She only had eyes for the detonator. Whether by accident or design, it was going to land almost at the foot of Tovelt’s dais. He ran towards her, one finger extended, evidently furious at being interrupted. Cara couldn’t spare a second’s attention for him—she thrust out one hand in an arm-bar and shoved him over onto his ample posterior. The grenade curved inward, coming in for a landing. Cara held out both hands to intercept it. Memories floated up: afternoons playing touchball with the neighborhood kids, knocking them over on their backs. She’d always been picked first.

It was the best catch of her life. The detonator landed right between her cupped hands, and she took its weight with a little dip, just in case she could defuse its impact trigger. It rested against her palms. It felt cool, as though it had just been taken out of an icebox. How long did she have before it went off? One second? Two? She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been this afraid. _Now_ the crowd saw what she was holding, and _now_ they panicked. Fine lords and noble ladies shoved and trampled in their effort to escape. Tovelt, too, scrambled backwards, his face a mask of terror. This close, it wouldn’t matter how far he got in the next second or two.

Cara spun on one foot, graceful as a dancer. She let her body counterweight the heavy detonator. As she whirled, she raised her arms, feeling the centrifugal force push the bomb away from her. She gathered speed for as long as she dared, then let it go. The detonator spiraled up and away from her, towards the empty front left quadrant of the room, the area it had come from. Honor guard troops ran away from that quadrant in blind panic. Cara watched the bomb rise and rise, expecting at any moment to be blown to hell. The thought filled her with a strange calm. _Well, I did my best_.

The detonator landed in the far corner, on top of the broken glass it had made on its passage in. It rolled over once, then lay still. _Then_ it exploded.

White heat filled the air. Cara’s vision blanked. She crossed her arms in front of her face and felt chips of stone and wood beating against her sleeves. A hot wind buffeted her, but it did not quite knock her over. Only then did the sound come. It exploded against her eardrums with the force of a turbolaser, filling her head, pounding against the inside of her teeth. She reeled backwards, clutching her ears.

She blinked, her vision slowly clearing. Her eyes had teared up and she wiped them clean with the back of one hand. The other honor guard were still stumbling around, clutching bleeding scalps or ears. They had their mouths open to scream, but Cara could hear nothing but a persistent ringing. The crowd was fleeing towards the exit—that part of it still on its feet. Many more dignitaries were lying on the ground, or rolling back and forth holding their heads.

One entire corner of the hall had collapsed. All of the other windows had broken, spraying their broken glass out onto the immaculately maintained yard. Beautiful tapestries lay in scorched ruin; antique friezes had been reduced to splinters. As far as Cara could tell, the devastation had not quite reached the audience, and those people lying on the ground were only stunned.

Something grabbed her by the shoulders, and she spun around to see Pell. He was white-faced, and it took her a moment to realize that he had been coated in plaster dust. He shook her by the shoulders and mouthed something. Cara squinted uncomprehendingly. Pell shook her again, and as though that had jarred something loose in her head, the sounds of the world came rushing back.

“-threw it!” Pell was saying. “Come on, Cara! We have to get out there now! Whoever threw that thing is still out there! Now! Before he gets away!”

Cara nodded. That was Pell: professionalism all the way. Behind them, a pair of honor guard troopers were helping Lord Tovelt to his feet. Cara and Pell made for the front door at a dead run.

Outside, the ruination of the building was even more obvious. The roof had partially collapsed in the corner, and small fires smoldered in the wreckage. A vast cloud of smoke and dust billowed out of a gap in the wall. It looked like the Palazza had been breached by some great siege weapon of antiquity. The gardens were littered with broken glass, pieces of scorched stone and shattered plaster, and fragments of burning tapestry. Pell and Cara crunched across the lawn.

Pell had his blaster drawn and armed in front of him. Cara went for hers and cursed. She’d left it inside. Wordlessly, Pell drew his sidearm and handed it to Cara. It technically wasn’t part of the honor guard uniform, but he’d worn it in a shoulder holster anyways. Good old Pell.

Now armed, she advanced carefully, maintaining an instinctive three-meter separation from Pell. The old skills came bubbling back up effortlessly: scan the sightlines. Stay low. Be aware of where your partner is. Never set up an enfilade, where both of you can be dropped with one bolt. Head on a swivel. Stay alert. Stay alive. Don’t get caught.

Pell reached the corner of the building and signaled back at Cara: _clear, but with some areas obscured. Advance with caution. Hiding places ahead_. She let him move out into the cover of a decorative fountain, then slunk up next to the building and peered around the corner.

_Hiding places_ was right: this side of the Palazza appeared to have a fully-grown hedge maze. Artful topiary sculptures surrounded it, fish and sunbursts and leaping felines, but the maze dominated the center of the courtyard. Cara had seen these mazes before: thorny borbu bushes, carefully grown and tended into shape. The idea of fighting in one sent a chill up her spine. The nearest bushes to the building had had their leaves stripped back by the force of the blast, but Cara could see a lot more maze up ahead. There was _no way_ she was going in there—not without aerial backup. Blind alleys, dead ends… the hedges themselves would provide about as much cover as a Naboo promise-kerchief.

Pell seemed to come to the same conclusion. He raised his commlink to his mouth and spoke quietly. Cara caught “droids” and “pursuit,” and leaned wearily against the side of the building. Pell looked at her, shook his head sadly, and put the commlink away. Only when he signed _all clear_ did Cara let out the breath she’d been holding.

“What’s the word, Pell?” she asked. He scowled.

“Nothing. Command scrambled aerial surveillance, but whoever did this is in the wind. They’re not on the Palazza grounds anymore.” Cara didn’t bother hiding her relief. She wasn’t sure what she would do if she were ordered into that hedge maze.

Belatedly, a half-dozen troopers from the honor guard jogged around the corner, led by Sergeant Reits. The sergeant raised one hand. “Nothing?” he asked. Pell shook his head mournfully.

“Just this maze. Feel free to explore at leisure, Sarge.”

“I thought this place was supposed to have autodefenses?” Cara asked. “Bomb-sniffers should have caught that detonator. Why isn’t the Force-damned legislature shielded?”

“It is,” Reits replied. “Normally, anyways. The system’s been fidgety since the takeover. Command thinks a stray shot from the _Ekidna_ might have knocked out a capacitor. As for the rest… it’s _supposed_ to have autodefenses, and as far as I know, nothing’s gone wrong with _them_.”

“Someone messed up, then,” Cara said. “Someone messed up bad.”

“You think so?” Pell asked. “I think maybe someone did their job a little too well. There are plenty of people in the Palazza’s security detail with access to the autodefense matrix. Wouldn’t surprise me a bit to learn that one of them has a low opinion of the Acting Governor.”

“A traitor?” Trooper Ixil asked. The Gand shook his head slowly. Gas hissed from his respirator. “Shameful. To hide such hatred behind a false face.”

“Well, the last time they tried going toe-to-toe with the _Ekidna_ , it didn’t work out so well for them,” Pell said. “The people of this planet are clever enough to know that’s not how they get rid of us.”

Reits ran one hand through his thinning hair and let out a long exhalation. He was an imposing man, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, with a moustache much thicker than the wispy hairs on top of his head. Cara thought maybe he had grown the first to compensate for the second. “There goes my day,” he complained. “Command’s going to have a fit. At least none of the VIPs bought it.” He looked at Cara. “Excellent job, Dune. I’ll put you in for a commendation for this. Where’d you learn to throw like that?”

“Alderaan, sir,” Cara said, blushing despite herself. “Touchball with the neighbor kids.”

“Well, I’m surprised you never went pro, with an arm like that. Lucky for me, at least, that we snapped you up first. Really, well done.” The other troopers murmured agreement, and the blush crept higher up Cara’s cheeks. She forced her face to go stony and tore off a salute.

“Just doing my job, sir.”

“Sir,” Pell said, “I think for the foreseeable, it might be better if we run Palazza security directly. I’ve got some experience working with TC-J9 standard pattern grids.”

Reits looked at him and nodded. “Yes, good. Fine. I’ll have a word with Lord Tovelt’s people. We can’t just be reactive, though. We need to sniff these traitors out. Trooper Ixil?”

The Gand gave a three-fingered salute and stood to attention.

“You were a Finder, right? Something like that?”

“A Findsman, Sergeant,” Ixil replied.

“So does that mean you can… I dunno, find our terrorist? This might just be some lunatic with a grudge, but it might be something more organized. I want you to investigate. See what you can dig up.”

“As you wish, Sergeant,” Ixil nodded. His respirator hissed again. “There are not many nonhumans on Capridor. People may be suspicious of Ixil.”

“Take whatever backup you need,” Reits said with a wave of his hand. “The rest of you… we’re doubling patrols, starting now. Be careful out there. Be watchful.”

The squad saluted. Cara, too, though her heart sank. She’d so desperately hoped that Pell was wrong. Now that the adrenaline was starting to fade, she couldn’t stop thinking about how close she’d come to dying. If she’d dropped the detonator… if the fuse had been just one second shorter… she shuddered. She’d accepted the chance of dying in battle when she joined the Rebellion, but this wasn’t battle. This was just attempted murder.

Pell fell in beside as they trotted back towards the Palazza. To his credit, he didn’t look smug. “Double patrols, eh?” he said. “Well, at least you’ll be out in the fresh air.”

“Lucky me,” Cara said. “You’ll be stuck in some security bunker, staring at screens all day and breathing recycled air.”

“Well, at least nobody will be taking potshots at me,” Pell replied. “Nice work if you can get it.” He put one hand on her shoulder. “Stay safe out there, Cara. I mean it. This was a sloppy first attempt. They’ll try harder next time.”

“So will I,” Cara said grimly. “If the people of Capridor think they can just blow up a couple of officials and everything will go back to how it was before, they’re in for a rude awakening.”

“Hey, there’s the Cara I remember,” Pell said with a smirk. “Remember Signite Beta? The refinery? How many were there that day, do you remember?”

“Almost too many,” Cara replied.

“Almost too many, right enough. But not quite.” Pell laughed. “I’ll miss our little talks, sitting in my security closet. Let’s get drinks tonight. We’ll go to the bar on Cara Street.”

"Sounds good.” Cara grinned to shake off the lingering phantoms. “You’ve got the first round. I’m the hero today, remember?”

Cara made it through the rest of the day on edge. She kept thinking about the old man and the little boy. Neither of them had been the bomber—the old fart probably couldn’t even lift the detonator—but there was _someone_ else. Someone with a grudge, and access to high explosives. She found herself jumping at shadows. She almost wished someone _would_ take a shot at her. Not really, but at least then she’d know where the enemy was, and she could shoot back. The mostly-empty streets had been beautiful before; now she could only see all the hiding spots, all the possible sniper nests. This city was a warren of crossways and alleys. It would be a nightmare to try to fight in here.

She turned onto Cara Street (she’d never bothered learning the street’s real name, and now never would) and headed for the bar. A wooden sign over the door read The Flying Blurrg, and depicted the same: a silly-looking beast, with bulging eyes and feathery wings. The front of the building was finished in stucco, with a few patches of artfully exposed brickwork and a solid timber framework. It wouldn’t have been out of place in a rustic village somewhere in the mountains, or a greeting card.

The inside was just as picturesque, with a long capwood bar and fathier-hide barstools. A couple of holoscreens had been set against the ceiling, usually showing some obscure Capridorian sport. Competitive logrolling, maybe, or a game where two teams of men batted about a ball with long wooden paddles. A few pieces of antique lumberjack gear had been hung on the walls: a lascutter, its emitter chased in bronze, or a set of mag-chains. Cara didn’t know what the clientele had been like in the Imperial days, but lately, it was the soldiers’ bar. They’d adopted it by virtue of it simply being the closest watering hole to their barracks, and their presence had chased out all the other regulars. Cara wondered if the barman cared. There were plenty of soldiers, and they drank a lot, but they tended to be lousy tippers.

Pell was already sitting at the bar when she arrived. He looked up from the ale he was nursing and gave her a friendly nod. Apart from them, the bar was mostly empty, but a half-dozen men Cara didn’t recognize sat in one of the booths at the back.

The barman started pouring her tsiraki without her having to ask. She turned to Pell and jerked her head towards the men at the booth.

“Who’re those guys?”

Pell made a face. “Locals.”

“Dangerous?”

“They’re not armed, if that’s what you mean,” Pell said. Cara trusted his assessment. He was pretty good at this sort of thing. “But they’re getting good and liquored up. Like, pulling courage from a bottle maybe.”

“Think one of them’s our bomber?”

Pell shrugged. “How the hell would I know? It would be pretty stupid to show your face in our bar after pulling something like that, but maybe they’re idiots.”

Cara took her drink, nodded at the barman, and slapped a couple credits down on the countertop. “I’ll keep an eye on them,” she said.

A few more Republic troops ambled in over the course of the next hour. Mostly, they preferred to drink in silence. Cara tried to follow the ball game, but the rules were even more complex and arcane than she’d anticipated, and as her mug refilled and re-emptied she found it harder and harder to understand what was going on. Pell tried to explain, but he had a solid head start on her, and he was matching her drink for drink.

The men in the back weren’t making it easy to concentrate, either. They’d reached the stage in the evening where they began to spontaneously break out into song. Cara wouldn’t mind that so much, except between the six of them there were never fewer than three songs going at once, none of them remotely in tune.

Still, she did her best to tune it out, until some wit decided to start singing _Our Empire’s Army_. One by one, the rest of them picked it up, making up in volume what they lacked in skill.

“We will fight our Empire's battles

In space, on land and sea!”

Cara gritted her teeth and slammed her mug down on the countertop. She turned around and met the gaze of one of the singers, a dark-haired man with a huge, bushy beard. He saw her looking and grinned. The makeshift choir wobbled their way through the end of the song, then broke out into lusty cheers. “Three cheers, boys!” the bearded man said. His voice was a basso rumble. “Well sung!”

Pell noticed where Cara was looking and laid one cautionary hand on her shoulder. “Easy, Cara,” he mouthed out of the corner of his mouth, but she wasn’t listening. She shrugged off his hand and stood up.

“Whassa matter, reb?” the bearded man asked. He stood up, a little unsteadily, and strode across the bar. His arms were spread wide, palms upward. “Didn’t care for our song?”

“Calm down now, Jeroboam,” the bartender said. Cara shot him a look that made him duck behind his bar. She turned back to the bearded man and smiled brightly.

“Nah, you boys are talented. I think you could go for the bigtime. Of course, you’d need some help hitting the high notes.”

“You’re not volunteering, are ya?” the man said. He was standing a foot away from her now, and every word gusted a cloud of boozy breath in Cara’s face. He cracked his knuckles with a sound like a speeder’s engine misfiring.

“Nah, I’ve got a real job,” Cara said. “But I bet if you cut the nuts off your tenor there, he’d make a fine soprano.”

The man she’d indicated snarled and leapt to his feet. “You hear that, Jer?” he said. “You gonna let her get away with that?”

“If you’ve got a problem with me, why don’t you handle it yourself, instead of hiding behind your husband?” Cara asked. She hopped lightly from foot to foot. Her heart was starting to race now. She was dimly aware of Pell and the other troopers getting to their feet, and the barman frantically taking down the bottles from the shelf behind the bar.

The big man—Jeroboam, apparently—growled at her. “Push off, reb,” he said. “This is our bar.” He punctuated this with a light shove to Cara’s shoulder. His palm was the size of her head, his fingers as big as sausages. Cara stumbled a step backwards but caught herself before she fell.

“It is?” she asked sweetly. “I dunno, I really like it here. Maybe we’ll claim it.” She paused for a moment, and things might have ended there, had she not added, “like your planet.”

Jeroboam roared and bunched those sausage fingers into a fist. He took his time winding up, and Cara easily ducked under his punch. She hammered one fist upward into his solar plexus, doubling him over. Another boozy cloud filled the air as the breath left his lungs. The rest of the locals sprang to their feet, yelling wildly, and Cara kneed Jeroboam in the nose as he was doubled over. She hoped that might put him out of it, but he straightened up again much quicker than she’d hoped, and made a grab at her. She jerked out of the way, but bumped her hip against the bar and stumbled, and he grabbed a fistful of her shirt. Holding her in place, he brought his fist around and punched her right in the face. Cara stumbled backwards, blood spurting from her nose. Jeroboam came after her, but before he could follow through, Pell hammered him in the side of the head with a clay mug. 

That opened the floodgates. The rest of Jeroboam’s crew piled in, yelling and whooping. The Republic troopers surged in to meet them. Cara grabbed the taps on the bar to steady herself and looked up in time to see Trooper Lind flatten a scrawny local with a huge haymaker. As she watched, Jeroboam grabbed Lind by his collar and slammed his head against the bar. Lind staggered, stunned, as the man he’d punched got to his feet. Pell kicked the man’s legs out from under him and he toppled again. Cara spat a wad of blood and dove into the melee.

All around her, fists and feet whirled and spun. The air filled with sounds: the meaty thud of flesh against flesh, cries of pain, the occasional smash and clatter of a breaking barstool. Jeroboam was in his element. He bellowed like a bantha and lashed out indiscriminately at whatever Republic troopers stumbled into his reach. Troop Kart hit him across the jaw with a solid punch, but Jeroboam just grinned and knocked Kart off his feet with his return blow. The Republic trooper landed on a table, which shattered under his weight and dropped him to the ground.

Cara found herself squaring off against one of the locals, a rough-looking man in faded flannel with a bushy moustache. They circled each other with their fists up like prizefighters. Moustache came at her with high jab, and Cara stepped inside the punch. She landed a solid hit on his side and followed up with a gut-punch. His eyes widened and let out an “oof!” of surprise. She stepped back to line up a jaw-cracking uppercut, but he bulled forward into her, knocking her off balance. She stumbled backwards and felt her butt hit the edge of a booth table. Moustache was still pushing, and she started to tip over. She couldn’t get any leverage to shove him off her, so instead she grabbed him by the shoulders and jerked her head forwards. Their foreheads met with a loud _thok_ , and his grip slackened. Cara grimaced at the explosion of pain in her head, but Moustache was far worse off—he staggered backwards, his eyes glassy. Cara got to her feet on the second try, put her hands against his shoulders and shoved. He fell back like a toppling tree.

She looked up in time to see Pell facing off against Jeroboam. The local man was much taller, but Pell was ducking and weaving, making himself hard to hit. He danced around Jeroboam’s side and hammered him with a series of quick jabs. The bigger man barely seemed to feel them. He grabbed Pell around the midsection, heedless of the fists hammering into his back and shoulders, and heaved him across the room. Pell flew a solid two meters and landed in a heap atop the bar. The few glasses that the barman hadn’t managed to rescue went flying and shattered with a tinkle of broken glass.

Jeroboam stalked after him, shoving Trooper Wilfors out of the way and grabbing Pell by the collar. Pell looked dizzily up at his assailant. His head lolled and blood trickled out of one nostril. Jeroboam grinned and drew back his fist. “Gonna claim our planet, are ya?” he slurred. “Teach you rebs a lesson!”

Cara lunged across the bar. She had intended to tackle Jeroboam, but she was unsteady on her feet, and halfway across the room she realized that she was about to fall. She flailed desperately, hoping to extend her forward momentum for just another few inches. The tips of her fingers closed around the hem of Jeroboam’s thick flannel shirt, and by some miracle, she managed to grab hold. As she slumped to the ground, the weight of her pulled him off balance. He dropped Pell and looked down at Cara.

“Whazzis?” he mumbled. At least he seemed thoroughly plastered as well. _Small blessings_ , Cara thought. He reached down to swat Cara out of the way and she grabbed his wrist with both hands. With a single, fluid tug she pulled herself to her feet. He tried to yank his arm backwards out of her grip, but she was too quick for him. She thrust his grasping fist forward, lodging it between two of the taps at the bar, then swiveled on the balls of her feet. Using her hips to build up momentum, she body-checked his trapped arm with as much force as she could muster.

There was a _crack_ and Jeroboam went white. “My arm!” he howled. “Crazy reb bitch broke my arm!” He pulled it out from between the taps and stared. His forearm seemed to have developed a second elbow, which crooked in the opposite direction from his first one. His hand hung limp at the end of it like a used handkerchief. The swirling brawl paused for a moment, everyone staring at Cara and Jeroboam.

Cara’s stomach lurched. She could feel the tsiraki from earlier clamoring angrily for revenge. It hadn’t liked being punched _at all_. “Time to go, Pell,” she hissed, grabbing him by the shoulders and tugging him off the bar. He slithered to the ground, but somehow landed on his feet. Pell was graceful like that.

The rest of the locals crowded around Jeroboam. “Call the constables!” one of them shouted. “You reb scum! You won’t get away with this! We’ll call your commander!” Meanwhile, the troopers were making themselves scarce. Lind helped Kart to his feet and the two of them ran for it. Cara started off supporting Pell, but after a few steps a cramp viced her guts and he had to take her weight. Leaning on each other for stability, they staggered out the door.

They made it nearly a block before Cara doubled over and the tsiraki came boiling back up. Pell was kind enough to hold her hair back, at least. She did her best to get most of it in the gutter. Too late, she realized she was still wearing the dress uniform. She groaned, and wondered if the laundry at the barracks could get puke out of Sachian weave.

Somewhere in the distance, sirens blared. The sound echoed and redoubled inside Cara’s head. “Come on, come on,” Pell hissed. “Get it all out, Cara, that’s ok. We gotta get back to barracks.”

“Don’t get caught,” Cara mumbled blearily. Pell smiled.

“That’s right. We sure didn’t. Nice moves back there, by the way.”

“Teach _him_ to call people reb scum,” Cara growled. With her stomach empty, she was already feeling better. “Alright, Pell, I’m ok, I’m ok. Let’s get moving.”

Leaning on each other for balance, the sound of sirens echoing off the buildings and growing closer every moment, they staggered for home.


	3. The Chase

There was never a _right_ way to take a dressing-down. It stung no matter how prepared you thought you were. But there were plenty of _wrong_ ways, and one of the worst was with the mother of all hangovers.

Cara squinted, because opening her eyes too wide hurt. The lights in the barracks were definitely too bright. And Sergeant Reits was too loud, and she couldn’t say anything about either problem because her tongue had been coated in Hutt slime. At some point last night, that same Hutt had sat on her head. She’d slept in the hated dress uniform, which had given a few errant splashes of vomit time to form a dry, crackly crust. All in all, she’d had better mornings, and that was _before_ the sergeant had hauled her and Pell out of their beds to rake them over the coals.

He ran his hands across his pate again, as though trying to tease his last few wisps of hair into a comb-over. “I mean, you couldn’t give me one day?” he asked, his voice pleading. “One day, Trooper Dune. Yesterday you were the hero of the hour. You couldn’t just let that rest for one rotation before you decided to piss in my nutrimix?”

“Sorry, sir,” Cara mumbled. Next to her, Pell nodded assent.

“It wasn’t Dune’s fault, sir,” he said. He sounded as hoarse and bleary as Cara felt. “It was those local bastards. They started it.”

“Of course they bloody started it!” Reits bellowed, loud enough to make both troopers wince. “They’re a bunch of out-of-work grunch-brains looking for trouble! You’re _New Republic_ _Guard_! You’re supposed to be better than that! And you, Trooper Rutledge, you’re supposed to be my security expert! What am I going to do with you? What do I do if that idiot with the broken arm lodges an official complaint?”

“Ask to see the bar’s security footage,” Pell offered. “He threw the first punch.”

“I already saw the footage,” Reits said. He sounded exhausted. “It doesn’t look good for either of you. But that meathead with the beard can afford to be stupid. _We_ can’t.”

“I’m sorry,” Cara said again, this time with feeling. She massaged her aching forehead and winced. “I really am. I let him get to me. It won’t happen again.”

“It won’t happen there, at least. You’re both banned from the Flying Blurrg.” Reits sighed. “Look, I understand. Those men were asking for trouble. But the situation here is tense. I don’t have to tell either of you that. After yesterday, especially. The word from above is: de-escalate. Governor Kerskyan is still a few days away. He’s arriving with his own detail, and with reinforcements, we won’t have to spread ourselves quite so thin. Until then, let’s try to get along with the locals, alright? No more brawling.”

“We’ll be good, Sarge, I promise,” Pell said.

“Best behavior,” Cara added. Reits waved a hand dismissively.

“You’re good people, Dune. You too, Rutledge. I’m relying on you. Don’t let me down.”

“I won’t, sir!” Cara stood up as straight as she could and saluted. The impact of her hand against her forehead flared pain throughout her skull and made her wince again, but she forced herself to smile.

Reits returned the salute, then sniffed. “And hit the refresher, you two. You stink.”

After he left, Cara slumped back in her bed and ran her hands through her hair. It felt matted and greasy, and she grimaced. Pell sat down hard on his own bunk, across from hers.

“This is bantha crap,” he said. “Those guys deserved a beating, Cara.”

She shook her head. “Nah, Sarge is right. We’re supposed to be setting an example here.”

“Oh, come on, Cara,” Pell said. “That guy was asking for it. Breaking his arm? A couple hours in a bacta tank and he’ll be fine. He got off easy, far as I’m concerned.”

“We can’t just beat the crap out of everyone who deserves it,” Cara said. “For one thing, it would take too long. Also, how are we ever gonna get along with these people if we’re at each other’s throats all the time?”

“We’re not!” Pell said. “Like I told you! They hate us.”

“This is supposed to be a New Republic planet someday,” Cara replied. “I mean, theoretically. We can’t just kill everyone and move on.”

Pell shrugged. “Was easier when we could, though. Wasn’t it?”

“You’re not suggesting—”

“No, no.” Pell shook his head and exhaled deeply. “No, I just miss the clarity of it, you know? With bucketheads, it was so simple. You shoot them before they shoot you. End of story. Now it turns out we have to make friends with the bad guys.”

“Well, if we make friends, maybe they won’t be bad guys anymore,” Cara said. As she spoke, she thought of the shrimp salesman she’d met. Yani? Yannik, that was it. “There’s always gonna be assholes on any planet. There were assholes on Alderaan. But not every asshole deserves a blaster bolt, you know?” She smiled. “Lucky for you.”

Pell smiled back at her and gave her a what-are-you-gonna-do shrug. “Fair enough, Cara. You’re a finer man than me.”

“And don’t you forget it,” she said. “You wanna hit the ‘fresher first?”

“Nah, she’s all yours,” he replied. “I’m just gonna lie down here and wait for these Kowakian monkey-lizards to stop dancing the hornpipe in my ear canal.”

Cara nodded and stumbled into the refresher. She felt about ten percent better once her stained dress uniform disappeared into the laundry chute, and another fifty percent at the feel of warm water against her skin. By the time the sonics kicked in, she felt like a new woman. Her hangover was even starting to fade.

Pell was wrong, she decided, as she lathered and rinsed her hair. He was a soldier, through and through, and so he only knew how to _think_ like a soldier. But the war was over. The New Republic didn’t need soldiers anymore. At least, not the hard-bitten shocktrooper kind. It needed constables, and teachers, and doctors, and… and shrimp fishermen.

She grinned. There was a Capridorian who would do just fine with the New Republic. She decided she’d visit his stand again today. It might be nice to see someone who was happy to see her, even if he was just after the credits in her pocket. Besides—her stomach gurgled—she was hungry. She’d thrown up her dinner last night and hadn’t had breakfast yet.

Her patrol route today took her past the Palazza, and she paused and lingered to inspect the damage. Repair droids swarmed over the outside of the ancient building like ants. Viewed from a distance, the damage didn’t look so bad—the shoulder of the building slumped drunkenly inward, but the roof was mostly intact, and the droids were hard at work erecting a new support post. _In a day or two, you won’t even know anything ever happened_ , Cara thought. She shivered. She’d remember the feeling of the bomb in her hands until the day she died.

The statues of the ancient kings looked down on her with, she felt, an unwarranted amount of judgment in their stone eyes. Were they saddened to see such violence against the stately old Palazza? Or were they proud of the bomber? Would they have welcomed the New Republic, or taken up arms against it? They had seen the rise and fall of the Old Republic, the ascendance of Palpatine, the Galactic Civil War. They’d seen more than that, stretching back into the mists of history. The Jedi, the Sith: the kings of Capridor silently watched them come and go, fight their wars and play out their dramas, and still they endured. _Capridor endures_ , Cara thought, and shivered again. Too much history here. She hurried out of the plaza, all the time aware of the stony gaze boring into the back of her neck.

Her patrol route took her past the Osivan Spaceport. Cara had been briefly surprised to learn that it wasn’t called the “Capridor Spaceport” as she’d assumed, but the depot clerk who’d told her had mistaken her curiosity for enthusiasm and launched into what sounded like it was going to be a very long and boring story. Whoever or whatever Osivan was, the spaceport that bore him, her or its name was as busy as Cara had ever seen it. A bulk transport was just vanishing up into the clouds as she strolled up; another sat on the ferrocrete, surrounded by vac-sealed cargo cubes. Stevedores and loader droids bustled around the grounded ship, guiding the hovering cubes into its storage bays with long mag-hooks.

She wandered over to the blockhouse by the gate and nodded at the guard. It was someone she recognized today: Jarrith, a Duros naval security trooper. Normally, Army and Navy didn’t mix much, but the droppers always deployed aerially and made a point to get to know the flyers they relied on. When you had to evac a dropzone under fire, you wanted to know that the face behind the cockpit canopy was a friendly one.

“What’s happening, Jarrith?” Cara asked, leaning against the side of the security booth. The Duros dropped the shimmering shield curtain and leaned his head out of the booth to reply.

“Not much, Dune. They got me sitting in this sweatbox again.” He puffed out his cheeks, the Duros equivalent of wrinkling one’s nose. “They always put me here after that pig Lliu Drae. How does someone that short fart that much?”

Cara laughed. “Practice, my friend, practice. No, I meant what’s going on in there?” She jerked her head to indicate the hive of activity down on the tarmac. “Is _Ekidna_ weighing anchor?”

“No, no.” Jarrith shook his head. “No, the frigate _Unbreakable_ made orbit today. They’re resupplying her now. This is just a way station—she’s heading out Rimward, hunting pirates.”

“Pirates?” That got Cara’s attention. After the Battle of Endor, much of the Imperial fleet had simply scattered to the stellar winds. More than one former Imperial captain had set himself up as a pirate or warlord in some benighted corner of the galaxy, where a Star Destroyer went a long way towards establishing one’s authority.

Jarrith nodded. “Ayup. They’re somewhere out by Oon, hitting shipping lanes to Lothal and Garel.”

“Pirates, eh…” Cara looked wistfully skyward and drummed her fingers against the outside of the security booth. “They’re probably taking some troops, right? For boarding operations.”

“Easy there, killer,” Jarrith laughed. “ _Unbreakable_ has its own contingent. Naval Security, the best in the business.” His skinny chest swelled with pride and he stood up straight, cutting what he definitely thought was a heroic pose.

Cara smirked at him. “Oh yeah, you vac jockeys are so _cute_ when you think you’re soldiers!” She reached into the booth to pinch his cheek. “Just don’t come crying for Auntie Cara to kiss your boo-boos when the big mean pirates blast your butts out the airlock.”

Jarrith, to his credit, took this in good humor. “Oh, we won’t,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll have your hands full here, standing around looking nice your dress uniforms and breaking up wood smuggling rings. Can’t let anyone steal the Republic’s precious wood.” His expression hardened. “And bombs, too. I heard about what happened at the Palazza the other day. Well done, Dune.”

Cara tossed her hair out of her face with a flick of her head. “All in a day’s soldiering. Tell you what, if you want to reward me, why not let me take one of those X-wings?” She pointed to where a half-dozen snubfighters sat on the tarmac. “I’ll sneak right up into _Unbreakable_ and go fight pirates for you. Nobody will even notice.”

Jarrith’s eyes, already huge, got wider, and he chuckled. “You? Pilot an X-wing? I’d love to see that. Might even be worth the dressing down I’d get from Command after you plow it into a tree.”

“Hey, I can fly! A little!” Cara insisted. It was true. Part of Dropper training involved the basics of stellar navigation, in case traditional evac proved impossible and they had to steal a ship. Jarrith didn’t seem to think much of this, though.

“Sure, sure.” He waved a hand. “It can’t be that boring down here, can it? Bombs and rebels and all that?”

“Rebels?” Cara cocked her head. “What do you mean?”

“Well, stands to reason, doesn’t it? We’re the government now. So all these imps out there, the ones throwing bombs, they’re the rebels. Hah, maybe we should call them ‘rebel scum.’ That’ll piss ‘em off.”

Cara hadn’t considered it that way before. Something about the thought disturbed her, though she couldn’t say what. “Eh, whatever,” she said, waving her hand to dismiss the topic. “Don’t give me an X-wing, fine. I’ll just sneak on and steal one later. The security you boys are running here wouldn’t stop a kid.” She pointed to the fence that encircled the tarmac. “That’s not electrified, and the alarm tripwires are strung solo. Simplest thing in the world to short one, cut it, and be through the fence before your security team even knows something’s wrong.”

Jarrith looked at the fence, then back at Cara. Sometimes it was hard to read Duros facial expressions, but he looked like he was gawking at her. Finally he shook his head. “You want my job or what?”

Cara threw back her head and laughed. “Not a chance. Have fun in the fartbox, Jarrith. I’m going back on patrol.” She waved goodbye and turned on her heel. _Pirates, eh?_ she thought as she walked away. _Well, it won’t be boring, at least. And they have the good manners to shoot at you face-to-face_.

She finished her patrol route just as the sun was starting to descend. As she stood and stretched, she realized she hadn’t managed to swing by the shrimp stand. All she’d had to eat so far was a nutribar from the barracks mess, which looked like a brick and was about as edible. She closed her eyes and tried to visualize the city plan in her head. If she took _this_ avenue eastward, she could hook left at the alley _there_ and cross the grand promenade, and then the waterfront was just through _this_ alley…

She set off at a jog. There was no gym in the barracks, and it didn’t do to let oneself get out of shape. Her boots thudded against the paving stones, and she quickly fell back into her regular rhythm. Buildings flew by: terraced homes, glass-fronted stores, a few cafes with outdoor tables. Passersby stopped to gawk. Cara ignored them all. Her long strides ate up the pavement and the wind whistled in her ears. She could feel it feathering her hair.

She turned right into an alley. Her feet kicked up little splashes from the stagnant water puddled in the gutter. The sound of her footfalls echoed off the narrow walls. Memories bubbled up: her childhood, running through the alleys of Juranno, shrieking with laughter as whoever had been chosen to be the Canyon Beast tried to hunt down its prey. Cara had always been too quick to catch. The memory cheered her. Juranno was gone now, but it lived on in her head.

She turned left onto the grand promenade, the widest street in the city. The promenade was Capridor City’s spine—it ran all the way from the city gates to the Kingsveld. Even with the occupation, traffic flowed steadily in both directions. She jogged along the sidewalk. Pedestrians stepped out of her way, some glaring angrily. Cara didn’t care. She was in her element.

Something caught her eye. A group of figures in hooded robes stood in the mouth of an alley just ahead. She wouldn’t have given them a second look, but they turned towards her as she approached, and she caught a flash of silver under one set of robes. Only for a second, but she was _certain_ of what she’d seen. A blaster.

She went for her gun, and the robed figures scattered. Cursing, Cara turned her jog into a sprint. One of them ran up the sidewalk, the rest disappeared down the alley. She made a snap decision and turned into the alley herself. If this became a firefight, she didn’t want civilians involved. As she ran, she raised her wrist commlink to her mouth.

“This is Cara Dune, day code 423-beta. I have contact on the Grand Promenade about two klicks north of the gate. Multiple potentials, one heading north, the rest west. Pursuing on foot. Be advised, they’re armed.”

Static crackled for a moment, then Pell’s voice came through loud and clear. “Roger, Cara. Dispatching backup now. How many are there?”

“Five, I think,” she replied. “One the street, four in the alley. I’m taking the alley.”

“Of course you are.” Pell sounded exasperated. “Stay safe, Cara. Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Say again? You broke up a little at the end there.”

“Never mind. Happy hunting, Cara. Don’t get caught.”

“Don’t get caught, Pell. Cara out.”

Cara had hoped this alley might dead-end, but no such luck. It opened out at the end to her right, and she could see the last traces of a dark robe disappearing into the connecting alley. She put on a burst of speed and skidded around the corner. This alley was lined with steel recyc drums. One of the hooded figures turned and grabbed a drum with both hands, tipping it over. It fell with a resounding crash, bringing the next one down with it. They rolled across the alley floor, spilling detritus onto the ground. Cara didn’t even slow down. She leapt clear over the drums and landed hard on a puddle, sending up a spray of filthy water. She was catching up to them, she knew she was. Just a little more…

To her left, a row of flakboard partitions separated this alley from someone’s backyard. One of the figures vaulted over the fence, and Cara hesitated. But the other three were still running straight. She ignored the jumper and kept pounding forward. Making sure her blaster was toggled to stun, she raised it and squeezed off a shot. Her aim was wide, and blue stun-rings dissipated against the brickwork.

She was getting closer, though. She’d surely be in range for a killshot, but she resisted the urge to switch her blaster over to _kill_. For one thing, she couldn’t learn anything from the plotters if she fried them where they stood. For another, Reits’s words echoed in her head. _Let’s try to get along with the locals_.

_Doing my best, sir,_ she thought grimly.

The three robed figures hooked around one more corner, and Cara slowed to a jog. Now that she was thinking clearly again, she realized how stupid she’d been. She’d _seen_ the blaster. These tight alleys were the best place she could imagine for an ambush. She’d have run right into it if these robed idiots had been smart enough to set one up. Rather than push her luck, she flattened herself against the wall by the corner and dug around in her uniform pocket. She always kept a mirror in her kit for this exact purpose. Palming it, she angled around the corner, trying to see to the next alley. If there was good cover there, she’d have to toss a flashbang.

What she saw was even worse than she’d expected. There was, in fact, excellent cover around the next corner. The best kind.

The alley opened up into a wide courtyard in between two tenement blocks. It looked like it was normally a pocket park, with a little grassy area and some benches. The kind of place children might play after school. Now, though, it teemed with people. Someone had set up a white tent at the far side of the courtyard, emblazoned with the starbird of the Republic. Steam rose from a wide-mouthed cauldron, carrying the scent of spices. The courtyard was packed from wall to wall with people, some sipping at rehydrated soup from plastic bowls, others clamoring for more. A half-dozen people wearing the white uniform of the Republic Rebuilding Corps stood in the tent, ladling out soup and handing out paper-wrapped ration packages.

Cara walked around the corner with her blaster up. The nearest people looked up at her and squawked in surprise. They scattered like birds before her advance. She scanned the crowd, looking for hooded robes. Nothing.

The commotion she was causing had reached the tent, and one of the Rebuilding Corps glared at her across the courtyard—a Mon Calamari, her head covered in a starched wimple. “What is the meaning of this?” she croaked. “What are you doing?”

“Calm down, friend,” Cara replied, her teeth gritted. “I’m in pursuit of hostiles.”

“There are no hostiles here!” the Mon Cal said. Indignation vibrated off every syllable. “Just hungry people! I must insist that you put away your weapon at once!”

Cara cursed. She’d just caught sight of three robes, discarded and heaped in a pile against one of the benches. She scanned the crowd again, hoping to catch a lucky glimpse of the illicit blaster, but to no avail. Wherever she looked, Capridorians ducked their heads to avoid her gaze. The expressions on their faces were blank and cowed, with none of the defiance she’d seen from Jeroboam or the old man in the square.

Sighing, she lowered her blaster, though she did not holster it. She pushed her way through the crowd to the aid tent. This wasn’t difficult—people fled before her and turned to stare with desperate, fearful eyes. Young children hid behind their mothers’ skirts. They all had the same hollow, wasted look: deep-set eyes, sunken cheeks, a general thinness around the wrist and ankle. The clothes they wore were tattered and filthy.

“Who are these people?” Cara asked. She was still scanning for her runners, but she knew it was futile. People were entering and leaving the courtyard all the time. They were long gone by now.

“Refugees,” the Mon Cal replied. With the excitement past, people were queuing up again, and she dipped her ladle into the cauldron. “The village of Havchank was destroyed by debris from the battle in orbit. These people have nowhere to go.”

“What, you can’t just put them in a building somewhere?” Cara swept her arm to take in the tenements all around. “It’s a big city, and it’s mostly empty, from what I can see.”

The Mon Cal’s barbels twitched, the equivalent of a derisive snort. “The people who own these buildings are sheltering in their estates in the country. They’re not about to open their doors to peasants without the means to pay.” Her tone said the rest: _You dumb grunt. All you know how to do is break things. You leave the really hard jobs to us_.

Cara deflated. She holstered her gun, if only to stop the Mon Cal from giving it pointed looks, and raised her commlink. “Contact lost,” she said. Weariness dripped off every syllable. “Any luck on your end?”

“No joy, Cara.”

She sighed and turned to the Mon Cal. “If you see anything suspicious, ma’am, any weapons or anything, please let us know at once. There are dangerous people out there.”

“I will,” the Mon Cal sniffed, but her expression left Cara little hope. She tried anyways.

“Please, ma’am. I’m just trying to help this world, same as you.”

“Yes, of course you are,” the Mon Cal replied. She looked Cara up and down. “Now, if you have no further business here, could I ask you to move along? You’re frightening our guests.”

All of Cara’s earlier energy had fled, and she trudged out of the aid station with her shoulders slumped. She could feel the aid workers’ eyes on her back as she left. Her hunger was back, too. _No more chases_ , she told herself. _You’re off duty. Be off duty._

On the other side of the grand promenade, the city left behind its crazy quilt of neighborhoods and winding backstreets. Here, closer to the waterfront, the buildings were larger, finer and farther apart. She could smell brine in the air before she even laid eyes on the river delta. Seabirds wheeled overhead, honking and cawing. She passed through a well-maintained garden path, though now that she was looking for them, she could see the signs of wear: a chunk of masonry had fallen from a rooftop ahead and splintered the branches of an _okido_ tree. Someone had cleared away the debris but left the tree where it was. The city hid its scars well, but the scars were still there. Some were very recent indeed.

Yannik’s stand was where she remembered it. As she approached, a young couple stood by the countertop, talking eagerly. Yannik was busy at his grill. Cara hesitated, unwilling to draw closer while they were still there. She told herself that she didn’t want to intrude on what seemed to be a private, romantic moment, but she knew there was more to her hesitation—even if she couldn’t quite tell what it was. At last, after what seemed like forever but was probably more like five minutes, the two of them strode off hand in hand. Yannik bent to polish his countertop, but looked up again at Cara’s approach.

“Ah! If it isn’t my favorite soldier!” Yannik sketched a mock bow. “What can this humble purveyor of fine seafood do you for, milady?”

“Your favorite, eh?” Cara leaned one elbow on the counter and chuckled. “Just how many Republic soldiers do you know?”

“Just one,” Yannik admitted. “But that makes you winner by default. You should introduce me to your friends. Tell them to bring their wallets with them.”’

That got a laugh out of Cara. “Same as the other day, Yannik. Maybe fifteen this time, I’ve got an appetite.”

“Are you sure?” he asked, half-turning towards his grill. “I do have other flavors, you know. You could branch out a little.”

“Really?” Cara feigned surprise. “Other flavors? Why, this is a much more sophisticated operation than I thought, sir. Far too sophisticated for an off-planet grunt like me. Alright, surprise me.”

He gave her a devilish grin. “Oooh, you may regret that, Cara. Alright, fifteen mystery shrimp, coming right up.” He fiddled with the dials on his grill, then reached into the compartment under the counter and began retrieving unlabeled jars of spice. Cara watched him work. His hands, despite their wear and calluses, moved quickly. He added a pinch of this, a sprinkle of that, turning over each shrimp in turn with his long-handled fork to ensure maximum coverage. The smell that rose off his sizzling grill was nothing short of heavenly, and Cara’s stomach gurgled in anticipation.

He slid five cooked shrimp onto his first stick and handed them over. “Here you go, ma’am. Oh, and I took the liberty of pouring you a glass of _mache_.” He pushed a tin mug across the counter. It appeared to be full of a milky white tea. “You may thank me later.”

Cara bit into the first shrimp and chewed with her eyes closed. The flavor was like the other day’s, but subtly different. There was a citrusy sweetness underlying the savor, a hint of something sharp. And the aftertaste…

“Ah!” she cried out. Her mouth hung open. “Hot! Hothothot…”

“The _mache_ ,” Yannik prompted. Cara grabbed the cup and swigged from it, in that moment not caring _what_ it was full of. Her mouth felt like someone had set off a proton torpedo inside it.

_Mache_ turned out to be more milk than tea, cool and refreshing with a slightly salty tang. The effect on her throat, however, was immediate. The burning heat of the shrimp cooled down to a low simmer that tickled her all the way down to her stomach. Cara burped happily and set the mug down on the counter.

“Better,” she said and wiped one hand across her forehead. It came away soaked. “You’re lucky, Yannik. I could bring you in for assault on a peace officer for that.”

He held up his hands in surrender. “I’m sorry I didn’t warn you,” he said. “I’d say that it was because it slipped my mind, but really I just wanted to see your face. Even I can’t handle the Volcanic Shrimp Deluxe without a glass of _mache_. They’re good together, though, right? Sort of damps down the spiciness to a tolerable level.”

Cara had to agree. She wasn’t much of a spicy-food person, but the tingle on her tongue was not entirely unpleasant. She bit hesitantly into another shrimp and an expression of bliss crossed her face.

“Oh! Yeah, it’s a lot better together. What is this stuff?”

“Milk from the highland hounch, mixed with herbs. Lots of herbs.” Yannik nodded sagely. “My mother used to swear by herbs.”

“Did she teach you how to cook?”

“Nah, that was my old man. He was a shrimper like me. He used to tell me, ‘Yannik, my boy, if you can’t cook your own catch, why are you even shrimping?’” He finished stacking five more shrimp on a second skewer and proffered it to Cara. “Here. These aren’t spicy, they’re just sweet. You’ll like them.”

Cara took the stick with a suspicious glare, and Yannik spread his arms wide. “What, have I ever lied to you?”

She fished around in her wallet and pulled out five credits. “For the shrimp and the _mache_ ,” she said. “And for talking to me. You’re the only Capridorian I’ve met so far who doesn’t seem to hate my guts.”

“No, no,” he insisted, pushing the money back. “They’re just a decicred each. I’m not hurting for money, Cara, I promise. No charge for the talking. You have wonderful guts, I’m sure.”

“Tell the rest of your planet that.” Cara frowned as memories from earlier returned with a vengeance. “Tell them that we just want to live in peace.”

“You can tell them yourself,” Yannik said, smiling gently. “Really, Cara, I promise they’re not all that bad. They’re just scared and anxious now. They want to go back to what they know. Once they get used to you, they’ll welcome you. Get to know them, and you won’t be a stranger anymore.”

“How can I get to know them when everyone I talk to seems to want me dead?” Cara asked. “Tell you what. Why don’t you show me around? Keep the money and be my tour guide. You want me to get to know Capridor? Show me yourself.”

Yannik laughed and extended a hand. “You’re on, then. I can paint it on the side of the _Lady_. Yannik Raow, fresh shrimp and planetary tours.”

Cara took his hand and shook it. “I have a day off in two rotations. I’ll meet you here around noon?”

“Deal.” Yannik retrieved the last five shrimp and deftly skewered them. “Your shrimp, milady. Don’t forget some napkins.”

Cara paused halfway through wiping her sticky fingers against her uniform pants and grabbed a half-dozen napkins from the dispenser. “See you soon, Yannik,” she said, waving goodbye. Her steps were light all the way to the barracks, and she couldn’t stop herself from smiling. Part of it was the delicious shrimp, of course, but her short conversation with Yannik had left her feeling happier than she had in a while. _Maybe Pell’s wrong. There is hope, after all. He can’t be the_ only _friendly Capridorian._

The barracks was filling up when she got back. Pell waved a greeting to her. “You wanna join me in the mess?” he asked. “I heard the rehyd soup is _ronto_ flavor today.” He waggled his eyebrows in the manner of one discussing a rare indulgence.

“Nah, I already ate.” Pell looked so crestfallen that Cara relented. “But fine, I’ll come with. Maybe they have pudding.”

There was no pudding, but Cara hung around the mess anyways. It was like every other Republic mess hall she’d ever seen, in every other prefab barracks she’d ever occupied: long, low-ceilinged, lit by glowpanels that seemed to become dim and dingy within seconds of arriving on-planet. Other troopers sat in small knots, huddled in whispered conversation. Cheerfulness wasn’t welcome here—it was where soldiers came to sit and recharge after a long day, not where they came to party. Many of them, she knew, would be heading for the Flying Blurrg in a few hours, to blow off the day’s steam. It still rankled that she had been banned. She hadn’t bothered picking a new bar yet. Drinking alone in hostile territory wasn’t her idea of fun.

“Well, how was your day, Pell?” she asked. “You have fun in your security closet?”

“Meh.” Pell held out one hand, palm downward, and waggled it back and forth. “It has its moments. Ixil had me talk to some locals. They won’t talk to a Gand, I guess, so I just read the questions off a script.”

“You get anything?” Cara thought back to her abortive pursuit that day. The memory still frustrated her. So far, they were chasing shadows.

“Not much,” Pell admitted. “But he’s the expert, not me. He spent a lot of the day slicing. It’s weird watching him work. I thought _I_ was good at this tech-stuff, but he’s like a droid.”

“Any leads on a new bar?” Cara asked hopefully. “Maybe we can find out where the boys from the 610th go?”

Pell made a face. “You want to drink with those meatheads? Frankly, I’d rather take my chances with the locals.”

“Oh, sure,” Cara said, rolling her eyes. “You know what I love when I’m out trying to have a good time? Having to run a poison sniffer wand through every single drink.”

“Hey, they’re not all bad!” Pell grinned, the toothy grin he always got when he was about to lay down some particularly juicy gossip. “In fact… I met this sweet local girl earlier today, when I was walking up by the Palazza. I was laying down cable and she was just sitting there reading.”

“Pell, you _idiot!_ ” Cara swatted him on the shoulder. “Are you the dumbest man in the fleet, or just the dumbest in our regiment? Have you ever heard of a honeypot?”

Pell scowled at her. “What, so if a girl talks to me, it automatically means she’s playing an angle? No other possible explanation?”

“Come on, Pell.” Cara swatted him again. “You think you happened to run into the one woman on the planet who doesn’t mind your uniform? Or do you think you just have a special kind of charm?”

“You know I do,” Pell said, raising his eyebrows and grinning again. “But no, I’m not stupid. I’ll run her background before I see her again. If anything jumps out at me, I’ll report her as a possible partisan. Happy?” He pulled out his datapad and brought up a picture. “Her name’s Pira. See? She’s totally sweet. We’re going out for _quri_ truffles in a couple of days. She says she knows this really cute place for a picnic.” He sighed blissfully. “You know, Cara I really think she might be the one.”

Cara rolled her eyes again and was formulating another gibe when a metallic _clank_ made her jump. Trooper Ixil had approached so quietly that Cara hadn’t been aware of him until his tray hit the table. The little Gand had his own food: pellets about the size of Cara’s thumb. They looked unpleasantly gelatinous to her. He unscrewed a cap on one side of his respirator and pushed a green pellet through. The tubing on that side of his face flushed green for a moment, and he sat back with evident satisfaction.

“What’s up, Ixil?” Pell asked. “How’s the hunt going?” Trooper Ixil was the best scout and tracker in the regiment—something to do with a mystic tradition from his homeworld, Cara gathered. She’d sometimes wondered if he had a touch of the Jedi about him, but the Gand was a taciturn type at the best of times, and could deflect even the most probing questions with a blank stare. Nobody could out-stare a Gand.

“It continues.” Ixil’s voice emerged from his mask as a breathy whisper. Fluid glugged through his tubes with each inhalation. There was something eerily calm about him at all times. _He’s spent most of his life living in places where the air itself is poisonous to him_ , Cara thought. _I guess you need some serious composure to be ok with that kind of existence_.

“Were the interviews I did for you useful? I have to say, I didn’t get much out of them.”

“They were, Trooper Rutledge.” Ixil’s breath-tubes sucked and rattled. “We face an invisible enemy. There are more of them than you suspect. More of them, better organized, more determined.”

“Have you told the sergeant?” Cara asked. “I mean, thanks for warning us, I guess—”

“Ixil has told Sergeant Reits everything he knows,” Ixil replied. “They call themselves the Sons of Capridor. Ixil is telling you because they have taken notice of you.” He looked from Pell to Cara and back. “Both of you. You foiled their bombing plot in the Palazza. They are not happy.”

Cara frowned. An unpleasant knot was starting to form in the pit of her stomach. “Ixil, are you saying we’re being targeted?”

“That, Ixil cannot say for certain,” the Gand replied. His voice was as serene as ever. “They are desperate and ruthless. Keep up your guard at all times. An attack may come from any direction.”

“Thanks, Ixil,” Cara said. She forced herself to smile. “Hey, I already stopped ‘em once. If I had a decicred for every group of loonies that called themselves the Sons of Whatever, I’d be able to retire to Coruscant.”

Ixil merely nodded and slid another food pellet into his mask. All at once, Cara couldn’t stand to look at him any longer. She stood up rather faster than she’d intended. “I think I’m gonna lie down,” she declared. “Maybe watch a holovid.” Pell looked up at her and shrugged.

“Good night.”

She could feel Trooper Ixil’s eyes follow her all the way out.


	4. Day Off

All throughout the next day, Cara was a bundle of nerves. She’d requested a paired patrol route, and Sergeant Reits had been more than happy to oblige. “I’m thinking of making the pairings mandatory,” he groused. “Want to head off trouble before it happens. We can’t be caught flat-footed.” Cara’s partner for the day was Trooper Juwann, a stolid and dependable Rodian whose professionalism was only matched by her complete lack of interest in conversation.

Cara spent her entire patrol thinking about the next day. She wondered if she’d been as stupid as Pell to accept a tour from a local. _It was your idea_ , she chided herself. _And who knows? Maybe Pell’s girl is the real thing. Yannik seems genuine enough._ She wouldn’t go on the tour unarmed, she told herself. And if he turned out to be a Son of Capridor and tried something… well, he’d regret it.

Now that she was looking for them, Cara saw more aid tents, too. Almost every public park downtown had one. She also saw the telltale signs of rough sleeping: piles of blankets and clothes stashed under trees or benches, scattered trash, little encampments tucked into alleys or under bridges. Capridorians stared at her without love or hate or even curiosity, just with a kind of sullen boredom. She wondered how many more villages had been bombed out during the battle in orbit. She hadn’t arrived until the planet had already been “pacified.” Just how peaceful had the pacification been?

Trooper Juwann didn’t care. She kept her eyes on the street and her gun in her hands and resisted any attempt to be drawn in on this topic. “Doesn’t matter what happened during the war,” she said. “We all did what we had to do. War’s over now. These people need to get that through their heads.”

Cara had to admit that there was a compelling logic to that line of reasoning, but it left her unsatisfied. For one thing, it begged the question “what happens when they don’t get it?” But she didn’t have a good answer to that question, either, so she kept her mouth shut.

That night, she decided to try and watch some of the local holovid channels, if only to get an idea of what the Capridorians were talking about. Most of it was mundane—sports scores, local news, some kind of game show involving feats of strength. She flipped over to a news channel and paused. The screen filled with a picture of the partially-collapsed Palazza façade.

“-have claimed responsibility for the attack,” the anchor was saying. “The Sons of Capridor have issued a statement threatening more violence unless ‘the Republic military ends its unjust and brutal occupation of Capridor and restores freedom to its people.’ Republic Governor-General Kerskyan arrives this week, and security is sure to be heightened, as Capridor City reels from-“

Cara shut off the holovid and closed her eyes. She was so very tired. Sleep took a long time to come—but mercifully, there were no dreams.

The next day found her unaccountably nervous. A half-dozen times she considered calling the whole tour thing off and staying in the barracks. Two things stopped her: first, she wasn’t a coward. How would the Republic ever keep the peace if its soldiers hid inside all day the first time they saw an ominous holovid? Second, she realized she didn’t have any way to get in touch with Yannik outside of just visiting his shrimp stand. If she stood him up, she’d never be able to eat there again. And the shrimp really were too good to give up.

Still, before she left, she made sure she was wearing her uniform, including her gunbelt. She activated her locator beacon, too. If something happened to her out there, she wanted the rest of the regiment to know where she was. _You’re going out for a walk on the town, stupid_ , she told herself. _You’re not walking into a warzone._ She’d done that, too, and had been less nervous than now. _Don’t go soft, Dune. Eyes up. Head on a swivel._

She arrived on the river esplanade just as the sun was hitting its noonday peak. It was a beautiful, cloudless day, and the reflection off the river was too bright to look upon directly. Overhead, seabirds wheeled and cawed. As soon as Yannik’s stand was in sight, Cara started to feel a bit better. He saw her coming from across the way and waved. “Ah, my favorite soldier is back!” he shouted as Cara crossed the riverwalk. “Just give me a moment to close up shop here and we can be on our way!”

Now that she was here, Cara wondered what all her nervousness had been about. Yannik was smiling, the sun was shining, and the air was thick with the delicious smell of cooked shrimp. He’d prepared a picnic basket, by the looks of it. Cara eyed it hungrily. “Do I pay extra for the food?”

“No charge,” Yannik laughed. “And there’s wine in here, too. Sapplan red, from the highlands.”

“Is that good?”

“If I say it’s the best on the planet, you wouldn’t know better, would you?” Yannik winked at her, and Cara shook her head. “Then it’s the best on the planet. Come on, give me a hand with these.”

Between the two of them they folded up the struts supporting the shrimp stand’s canopy. The countertop receded into the metal framework of the stand. Yannik stepped back and pulled out a control rod from his pocket. He clicked a button, and a shimmering personal shield sprang up around the collapsed stand. “That’s taken care of, then,” he said, and turned towards Cara. “Well. Shall we?”

She thought he might offer her his hand, which would have been a bit presumptuous, but he just set off at a leisurely pace. As they walked alongside the river, Yannik gave her a pocket version of his family history.

“Raows have been shrimping along the Capridor River for hundreds of years,” he said, beaming proudly. “Well, except my uncle Malo. He’s always been a bit weird.” He dropped his voice into a whisper and spoke in the manner of one confiding a relative’s unfortunate affliction. “He’s a _banker_.”

“Does the boat get passed down, too?” Cara asked. She still wasn’t sure which boat was his. The river was full of them today, puttering lazily upstream and down. The shrimpers were easy to spot: they were painted carnival-bright, with mythical creatures crawling up their flanks and across their bows. Some of them dragged trawling nets behind them. Others were festooned with clusters of sensor spines like the bridge of a capital ship.

“Oh, of course,” Yannik said. “The _Lady_ goes back to my great-great-great-grandfather’s day. She’s an antique. I made some modifications, of course. Dad put in a sonic emitter, but I stripped it back out. That’s cheating, in my opinion. A shrimpman should use his hands. Otherwise, why not just have droids do it?”

Cara found herself nodding along, though before today she had not spent one second thinking about the mechanics of commercial shrimp fishery. Yannik answered her polite questions: what types of shrimp the river held (more than forty!), whether he had a crew (sometimes he hired on a boy to do some of the lifting and carrying, but usually he went out solo), and the prospects of the shrimping industry on Capridor (not as bright as they once were, with restaurants mostly closed down, but he was optimistic that business would come back once the situation settled).

“Come on, Cara, you don’t have to pretend to care about this stuff to be polite,” he said. “You hired me to give you a tour, not just explain shrimping to you. So let’s start here.” He pointed across the river to the forest. “How deep do you think that goes?”

Cara squinted. All she could see were trees behind trees: a seemingly endless sea of green. “Hundred kilometers?” she asked. Yannik laughed.

“Try five.”

“Five hundred klicks?!” Cara tried to visualize that. She wished she’d looked out the viewports more while she was in orbit.

But Yannik was shaking his head. “No, five. Beyond that it’s basically sprat—that’s what we call a logged-out plain. Back when Capridor City was founded, the timbermen stripped the area around the city barren. They replanted some trees, but only for the look of the thing. We want to imagine that we’re living in the settlement days, with untouched forests all around, but it’s just a façade. There’s an army of caretaker droids infusing the soil and patrolling the woodland to make sure it stays pristine, but only far enough that you can’t see through it. Past that it’s pretty much just factories and farms.” He laughed. “Ridiculous, huh? We’re so in love with our past, we won’t let it go even when it’s our fault it’s gone.”

Cara smiled. “Where does all the wood come from, then?”

“Oh, way upriver.” Yannik waved a hand in that direction. “Up in the mountains, that’s where the _real_ old-growth forests are. There’s trees up there that have never even seen an axe. That’s why the city was built here—early loggers would float the timber downriver, and all the lumbermills were built here, next to the port.”

“I’m surprised there are any trees left,” Cara said. “Wasn’t Capridor settled thousands of years ago?”

“Yeah, but they husband the timber really carefully,” Yannik replied. “Strict annual limits on cutting, and harsh penalties if you go over. I mean _really_ harsh. In the old days, they’d cut off your hands with a vibro-saw.” He saw Cara’s expression and laughed. “These days it’s just a fine, plus you lose your license. We’re not barbarians.”

They turned inward, away from the river, and began strolling along cobblestoned sidewalks. Here, too, Yannik was a font of knowledge. “This is Oldtown,” he explained, “not because it was the first part settled, but because the old money homes are here. Know how you can tell?” He stopped and pointed at a rowhouse with a marble façade festooned with ivy and creepers.

“The real moneybags built their houses out of stone, since wood was so cheap. So they could build them bigger and closer together, because they didn’t have to worry about fire. Elsewhere the original houses were wood, so they were farther apart. Even now that everything’s ferrocrete and durasteel, the houses were just built on top of the old foundations. Hence all the alleys.”

Cara found herself nodding along. “Those alleys must be fun for kids.” She found herself remembering her own chase the other day.

“Oh, _yeah_ ,” Yannik said. “We had this game, basically racing, where you had to get from my buddy Bram’s house to the waterfront. Catch was, you couldn’t use the same alley twice in a week. So we’d run every day, and by the end of the week we’d be looping like mad to find some route we hadn’t taken yet.” He laughed. “I think I could get from the docks to the Palazza without ever using a main road, if I had to. Come on, I’ve got more to show you.”

Yannik seemed to have an anecdote or historical fact about almost every building they passed. Cara felt them wash over her in a dizzying wave. She didn’t mind, even though she knew she would barely remember half of it. Just being outside on a sunny day with Yannik was melting away the fears and anxieties that had gripped her since the bombing. His sunny attitude was positively infectious. Neither of them mentioned the occupation, but Cara got the sense that Yannik wasn’t avoiding a delicate topic. He just didn’t care much. They walked past theaters and museums, and Yannik surprised her with a passable approximation of a famed Capridorian tenor. “Sure, I’ve been to the opera,” he said, a little defensively, when she brought it up. “It’s not exactly exclusive. Bleacher seats a credit each. You should go sometime, once it opens back up.”

Cara thought not, but she was too nice to say so. She just nodded and let Yannik lead on.

They entered the Kingsveld and Yannik pulled up short. His grin faded. He looked as solemn as Cara had ever seen him. “This is a very special place,” he said, and pulled off his cap. “The first settler ship on Capridor touched down here. Right there, actually,” he said, pointing to an obsidian stone set in the middle of a tile mosaic. “They built the statues later, after the city had grown up around this site.”

“They’re kings, right?” Cara asked. “Stupid question, I know.”

“Not just any kings,” Yannik replied. “The first ten kings. The Force-Guided, we call them. The Force led them to Capridor and the Force gave them the strength to endure those early days. Each of them taught us a lesson.” He pointed from statue to statue. “King Waroch, who taught us courage. He led the settlement and broke the trail for those who came after. King Wihomarc, who taught us patience. He tilled the land and raised crops to feed us. King Alain, who taught us endurance. He guided the settlement through the First Famine and the Grey Death, and ensured that it wouldn’t fall. And so on, and so on.” He trailed off, suddenly self-conscious. “Sorry, Cara, I know this sounds like a bunch of hokey nonsense. It’s just… there’s a lot of history here, you know? We’re proud of it. Capridor endures.”

Cara stiffened. “What did you say?” she asked. Her hand went to her belt and the comforting weight of her blaster. She took a half-step away from Yannik, and he turned to look at her with confusion in his eyes.

“What? We’re proud of ourselves? Cara, what’s wrong?”

“Not that,” Cara hissed. “The other thing. ‘Capridor endures.’ Why did you say that?”

“What? It’s a motto, Cara,” Yannik laughed nervously. “Every kid learns it growing up. We endure. It’s what we do. What’s gotten into you?”

Cara relaxed an inch or two. She dropped her hand to her side, hoping Yannik hadn’t noticed her touching her gun. “Sorry. Sorry. It’s just… whenever I’ve run into some Republic-hater, they spit that motto at me. I guess I sort of have a bad association with it.”

“It’s just a motto,” Yannik said. “Look, Cara, people here are proud, like I said. ‘Capridor endures’ captures that. We’ve been through a lot. Old Republic, Empire, and now New Republic.” He laid a hand on her shoulder and smiled. “That’s why I’m so sure this’ll all work out in the end. We’re used to transitions. Empires rise and fall, galaxies change, and Capridor endures.”

Cara made herself smile. Once it was on her face, the smile started to feel a bit less false. “I… guess you might be right,” she allowed. “Still, I wish they wouldn’t see us as something to _endure_. The Republic wants what’s best for Capridor.”

“Hey, you don’t have to convince _me_ ,” Yannik said. “I just want to sell people shrimp. Come on, too much history is boring. Let’s check out the good stuff.”

He took her on a long, winding route, pointing out notable shops and restaurants or unique architectural marvels along the way. As they went inland, the city rose into the foothills of the distant Betarik range, and they began to climb. This part of Capridor City was leafier, with little groves intruding in between the buildings like the probing fingers of the forest. “Now, this you’ll _really_ love,” Yannik promised. He led her through a wrought iron gateway into what looked like a massive public common.

Cara’s feet crunched over a pebbled pathway. All around here were little squares of green, neatly divided by the pathways like the squares on a dejarik board. Each square was perhaps three meters by three, and each held its own personal garden. One square was full of long-stemmed pink flowers, waving to and fro in the breeze; another held a single, looming willow tree, its drooping branches nearly reaching the ground. Some of the squares had water features, little fountains or shallow ponds where bright orange fish teemed. Cara could see other pedestrians walking through the park. Some picnicked on blankets spread across the green, while others were feeding fish or songbirds from paper bags. Her eyes swept across the scene and the breath caught in her throat.

“Yannik, it’s _incredible_ ,” she breathed. “What _is_ this place?” She took a deep breath and her nose filled with a fresh floral scent. No two green patches were exactly alike, she noticed; some looked rugged, almost wild, while others were as carefully manicured as the Royal Gardens of Alderaan. Yannik chuckled.

“Good, huh? These are the Gardens of Anhava. Built by King Gurvand, in thanks, after his wife survived the Grey Death. And free to anyone, Capridorian or visitor alike. Always will be.”

“Who maintains it?” Cara asked. “Droids?”

Yannik shook his head. “No, no droids allowed in here. There’s an order of sacred gardeners. They don’t stop for anything. See, there’s one now.” He pointed at a bent-backed old man in saffron robes. The man stood next a topiary fish with an appraising look on his face. As Cara watched, he retrieved a pair of shears from his robe and began delicately snipping at the bush.

“This place is amazing!” Cara said. “I mean, it’s just… I can’t believe I’d never heard of it!”

“Best-kept secret on Capridor,” Yannik winked at her. “Come on, let’s go for a stroll.”

They wandered for what felt like hours, past gurgling brooks and gently waving flowerbeds. Every step brought new scents to Cara’s nose, all of them fresh and sweet. As they passed a stone birdbath, a brightly colored sapfinch descended and immersed itself in the water. It hopped out and ruffled its feathers, spraying droplets in all directions. Cara laughed in surprise and the bird chirruped at her.

“Yannik, let’s spread the blanket here!” she insisted. “I’m hungry. And the view is incredible.”

To her surprise, Yannik began to blush. He half-turned away. “I-I don’t think that’s a great idea, Cara,” he mumbled. “There’s an even better view about a half-kilometer up the road. All the way down to the seaside. Why don’t we eat there?”

“Nah, here is fine,” Cara said. “It’s beautiful. And the smell! Incredible! Hey, take some holos of me, will you? I want to remember this place.” She handed him her datapad and brushed the hair back out of her face. “How do I look?”

“Uh, very nice, of course,” Yannik said, still somewhat abashed. The moment seemed to have robbed him of his composure. “Strike a pose!”

Cara held out her arms and flexed, and Yannik held the datapad up and clicked the holocam toggle. Cara lowered her arms and held them demurely in front of her, tilting her head and batting her eyes like a holovid starlet. _Click, click, click_. Yannik took a half dozen more in different poses and handed the datapad back.

“Alright, no more waiting. Spread that blanket.” Cara rubbed her stomach. “Come on, I want some shrimp!”

“Ah, really, we shouldn’t,” Yannik said. “Uh, you see, the thing about this place is… it’s… well…” he swallowed hard and adopted the expression of a student trying not to get in _too_ much trouble with the teacher. “Well, this is a public garden, right? And people just come here and walk around and stuff in the daytime. But, traditionally, if a man and a woman come here at night… or if they eat a meal here together… it means they, you know, are, sort of, in love. Or something.” His face shone red from neck to forehead now. “Sorry. I should have explained that before. I just figured we’d see the Gardens and then go eat somewhere else.”

“Oh.” Now it was Cara’s turn to flush a little. Her stomach fluttered, ever so slightly. “Oh, we had traditions like that on Alderaan. Like, you could give supian lilacs to anyone, but if you gave someone a bundle of lilacs _and_ anthroce, it meant they were your one true love.” Remembering that made her feel strange. As far as she was aware, there were no supian lilacs left anywhere in the galaxy. The tradition existed only in her memory now. _And I never even got a bouquet_.

“Well we don’t want to give anyone the wrong idea,” she said, and let out a bark of nervous laughter. She couldn’t quite meet Yannik’s eyes, but that was ok, because he looked like he was having difficulty meeting hers as well.

“No,” he agreed, “certainly not.” They stood in silence for a moment, looking alternately at the ground and the sky, then he added “it’s a nice garden though, isn’t it?”

“It really is,” Cara agreed, and took a deep breath. She wasn’t going to let a little awkward moment spoil what had otherwise been a wonderful day. “Come on, show me that great oceanview spot you’ve got. Make it quick, I’m starving.”

“Your wish is my command, ma’am,” he said with a little bow, and just like that, they were having fun again. Cara smiled. Yannik’s tattoos made him look like a hard-bitten sailor type, but he was a natural showman. Too bad he’d never auditioned for the stage. The holovids had missed a natural talent.

As they left the garden, someone called out Cara’s name. She looked over her shoulder in time to see Pell standing up and waving. He had spread a checkered black-and-white blanket across one of the green patches, and Cara could see a half-finished meal laid out atop it: a loaf of rye bread, two leafy bowls of salad, smoked ronto sausage chopped into bits, and a small plate of pastry-wrapped chocolates. Behind Pell stood a petite blonde woman, her long hair coiled into two plaits and coiffed around her head. She looked like an Agamarian milkmaid from a children’s holovid.

“Cara!” Pell said again. “Fancy seeing you here! Enjoying your day off?”

“Hey, Pell!” Cara waved back. “Just getting a tour of the city.” She indicated Yannik, who waved with one hand. His other hand was occupied trying to hide the basket of food behind his back. “Who’s your friend?”

“Oh, this is Pira! Pira, meet Cara Dune. We, uh, we work together.”

Pira curtseyed, which only compounded the farmgirl impression. “Nice to meet you, Cara,” she said brightly. Her voice was high and brittle, but it _seemed_ genuine enough. Cara sized her up. _This is the honeypot, eh? Well, she doesn’t look like a spy. They never do, though._

“Ah, Pira!” Yannik said. “You remember me, yes? Neven’s son?”

Pira stared blankly for a second, then recognition flashed across her face. “Uh… yes! Yannik, right? You’re a tour guide now?”

“Something like that.” Yannik flashed a megawatt smile. “It’s lovely to see you doing so well. Please give my best to your mother. Her blue-water ale is the best in the sector.”

“I will, of course!” she said. “Uh, Pell, this is Yannik.”

“Yannik Raow, at your service.” Yannik took Pell’s hand and pumped it enthusiastically. “Shrimp fisherman, cook, and occasional tour guide. Your cohort here retained me to show her around the city. Perhaps later I could meet more of your fellows? I do offer group rates.”

Pell shuffled awkwardly from foot to foot, like a child who’d been caught doing something naughty. “Well, it was nice to see you, Cara. Nice to meet you too, Mr. Raow. We really should be getting back to—”

“Yes, we should be on our way,” Cara said. She smirked at Pell, but only once she was sure Pira wasn’t looking. “See you back at the barracks this evening.” They waved their goodbyes, and as Pell and Pira returned to their blanket, Cara fell in next to Yannik.

“So you _know_ her?” she asked. “That’s a coincidence.”

“Not so much as you might think,” Yannik replied. “Pira’s parents run a tavern by the waterside. I knew all the dockyard kids growing up. And it doesn’t surprise me much to see her up here.”

“They were _eating together_ ,” Cara said, suppressing a giggle. “Doesn’t that mean—”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if your soldier friend doesn’t know that particular tradition,” Yannik said. “Pira certainly does, though.”

“He did tell me he had met a girl.” Cara tapped her chin thoughtfully. “I thought he was getting suckered. You know, the old honeypot gambit.”

“What, Pira? No, no.” Yannik waved his hand. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but I don’t think that girl has the brains to spy. No, like I said, I’m not surprised to see her breaking bread with a Republic trooper in the Gardens. Pira Roundheels, we used to call her.”

“You mean she—” Cara snorted. “Seriously?”

Yannik only shrugged. “She’s a nice girl. She just tends to fall head over heels quickly, you know? A real romantic, is Pira. Take care of your friend—he might need it after she breaks his heart. Pira doesn’t have much attention span.”

“Pell’s a bit of a heartbreaker himself,” Cara confided. It was true that he met a girl on almost every deployment, but he never seemed to be that broken up when they had to move on. He’d put the moves on Cara herself, a long time ago, and it had been fun, but it hadn’t lasted. That was ok; these days, they were more like brother and sister.

“Well, let’s hope that they can work it out,” Yannik said. “Love should be cherished. It sleeps in all of us, and its waking is a terrible sweet thunder.”

“You sound like you’re quoting something. Who is that?” Cara asked.

“Ah, one of the later Kings. I have to admit, I get some of them mixed up too.” He looked furtively left and right. “Don’t tell anyone I told you that. We Capridorians have our pride. Do you know, I had to recite the entire lineage of King Liac to graduate? It took me twenty minutes.”

Laughing and joking, they left the garden and climbed the hill to Yannik’s lunch spot. It turned out to be another public park, much less elaborate than the Gardens of Anhava. A few stone benches were scattered around, but Yannik led them up a small hillock. At the top, he set down the basket and pulled out a folded blanket. “Here we are, then,” he said. “Look around.”

Cara turned and her breath caught in her throat. Capridor City sprawled at her feet like an unfurled tapestry. The afternoon sun reflected off copper roof panels and slate-grey tile, broken here and there by bell towers and spires. She could see occasional groves and parks, little islands of green filled with tiny, milling figures. The Kings rose above their city, their heads and shoulders jutting out beyond the roofs, but Cara could see clear over the tops of their crowns. Beyond the city she could see the river, a meandering ribbon of blue dotted with specks of color. Just beneath the horizon she could make out the cloudy white arcs of the beaches, before they too vanished into the all-encompassing blue-green of the sea.

“Wow,” was all she managed. “Wow, Yannik, this is…”

“Good, isn’t it?” He stepped up next to her, shoulder to shoulder. “There, that building is the tavern Pira’s parents own. And I grew up… there.” Cara squinted, but couldn’t tell which of the nearly identical houses he was pointing towards. This far up, the waterfront tenements were a crazed sprawl of brick and wood. It was impossible to tell where one ended and the next began.

She turned back towards the hill, momentarily too dazzled to speak. Yannik had worked quickly: he’d set out two plates of shrimp, each with a half a loaf of bread and a slice of cheese. He’d also poured two carafes of wine. “Don’t worry,” he said, as he saw her eyeing it. “This is lunchtime wine. Barely any alcohol at all.”

Cara, in truth, would have been ok with a little bit of booze, but she accepted this too with equanimity. She sat down cross-legged in front of her meal. “Thanks for this, Yannik,” she said. “You really went all out.”

“Well,” he replied, “you only get one chance to make a first impression. I wanted to show off Capridor’s good side, Cara. I want you to like this place. I want…” he trailed off, and shook his head. “I want you to see that we’re good people. We’re ready to be New Republic…ites? New Republicans?”

“New Republicians? No, that can’t be it.” Cara shook her head. “Well, whatever it is, you’re welcome to it. Just gotta convince the rest of your planet.”

“Hey, Pira seems to be on board,” Yannik said. He raised his carafe. “To Pell and Pira, eh? May they bridge the gap between our people!”

"I’ll drink to that,” Cara replied, and clinked her carafe against his. The wine was sweet and tart, and it perfectly set off the sharpness of the cheese. The shrimp, too, were as good as she remembered, even cooled down a bit. She ate and drank slowly, savoring her meal. As she ate, Yannik regaled her with stories of the shrimping trade, many of which seemed to involve huge catches that went tragically missing due to unforeseeable and bizarre circumstances.

“Really?” she asked after one particularly unlikely anecdote. “The shrimp stole your net?”

“There’s thousands of the little buggers,” Yannik insisted. “If they all swim in the same direction, I mean, what am I supposed to do? It was cut the line or be dragged under.”

“You know, we had big-fish-gets-away stories on Alderaan, too,” Cara said. “Only we all knew they weren’t true.”

Yannik grew solemn. “Do you miss it?” he asked. “Alderaan, I mean. I can’t imagine what that’s like, losing your home…” He scowled. “I’m sorry, that was terribly rude of me. Forget about it.”

“No, it’s ok,” Cara said. “I can talk about it. Yes, I miss it. Every day. I knew when I joined up that I wouldn’t be going back to Alderaan anytime soon. I just knew it was out there to go back to someday, you know? And that comforted me. Losing that…” she sighed heavily. “Yes, it was hard. It was hard for all of us. But we move forward. Princess Organa saw it happen, and she didn’t let it stop her. There are still plenty of us out there in the galaxy. As long as we are still around, Alderaan won’t be entirely gone.”

“It’ll endure,” Yannik said. “Sorry, is that ok?”

“No, it makes sense,” Cara said. “I think I get it. Capridor endures? Well, Alderaan endures, too. That’s pretty worthy.” She sipped the last of her wine.

They say in silence for a moment. The sun was starting to set, and its reflection flared orange in Cara’s glass. She stared at it for a moment, turning the glass over in her fingers, then looked at Yannik.

“Well! This was a great day. Should we start heading back now?”

“Yes, I think so,” he said. “There’s one more thing I wanted to show you. Don’t worry, it’s quick.”

The two of them put away the dishes and folded up the blanket, and Yannik hefted his basket. “Next stop is where we started, down at the docks. Shall we?”

The pathway they’d climbed was lit now by fizzing glowlamps set in baroque brass casings. Cara took her time descending—it was all too easy to imagine falling and braining herself on the steep roads. They made the descent safely, though, and Yannik turned towards the waterfront. By now, the sun had fully set, and the stars twinkled overhead. Capridor had only one moon, and it was almost full tonight, supplementing the light from the streetlamps. By now, Cara was growing familiar enough with the roads to know when they were getting close to the waterfront. As they approached, she slowed her pace. She knew that when they got back to Yannik’s stand, she’d have to go back to her barracks, and she wasn’t ready for the day to end. Not yet.

They emerged onto the riverwalk, but Yannik didn’t make for her shuttered stand. Instead, he led Cara over to the short fence that divided the walk from the jetties. “Here,” he said, and pulled himself over the top of the railing. “Hop on over. Don’t worry, there’s a walkway on the other side.”

Cara planted her hands against the top of the fence and swung her body over the top. As Yannik had said, there was a walkway here, just a narrow strip of ferrocrete. He led her along it for a few meters, to where a long wooden gangplank descended down to the river. His boots clomped along the gangplank, making the whole thing shake. When he was halfway down, he turned.

“Come on, Cara. Don’t worry, this thing’s got grav-plates on the underside, it’ll take both of our weight.”

Cara followed, hesitantly at first, but once she tested the gangplank she picked up the pace. Yannik was waiting for her at the bottom. A wooden pier about the size of a Republic lander extended out into the water, with boats tied up on either side. They bobbed silently on the black water of the river. Cara took a step out onto the pier, which creaked underfoot.

“Come on,” Yannik said, beckoning. “To the end, here.” He strode the far end of the pier and knelt down there facing the water.

Cara followed and knelt down beside him. “What is this? What am I looking at?” she asked. “I swear, Yannik, if you push me in…”

“No, no,” he said, “shhh. Look.” He pointed. At first Cara couldn’t see what he was pointing at. She could see black water and the reflections of a few stars, and that was it.

Then her brain told her what her eyes were actually seeing. She wasn’t seeing the reflections of the stars overhead. Something below her, about four meters down, was glowing. It was a pearlescent light, and as she watched, it grew and spread. Constellations formed on the river bottom, a mandala of eerie light.

“The pearl beds,” Yannik said, his voice just above a whisper. “Capridorian mud-oysters. Too foul to eat, and those pearls stop glowing if you remove them from the oyster, so they’re no good as jewelry. But look at them!”

Cara did. Gradually, she became aware that what she had thought was just green-white light contained a multitude of shifting colors: blue, green, purple, even a hint of red. They spread, merged, split, and shimmered. She stared, mesmerized. “What in the…” she managed. “How?”

“Scientists say they use the colors to communicate,” Yannik said. “Me, I just think the oysters like them because they’re pretty. Why does everything have to have a reason?” He say back on his haunches and grinned. “So that’s the tour, then. Officially concluded. What did you think?”

“I…” Cara trailed off and swallowed hard. The butterflies in her stomach were back all of a sudden, and she couldn’t think of what to say next. “I… you were right, Yannik. Capridor is beautiful.”

“It’s my home,” he said. His voice was suddenly soft and distant. “I’ve never been off-planet. Never even tempted. I was born here, and I’ll die here.” He looked over at her. “It could be your home, too, Cara. You don’t have to wander the galaxy forever. The war’s over. It’s time to rebuild.”

“They’ll move us on soon enough,” Cara said, but for the thought snagged in her brain. _Home? Here? Why not? Has to be somewhere, right? Alderaan is gone. And I can’t be a soldier forever._ She felt herself teetering on the edge of a precipice, and half of her wanted nothing more than to jump. Instead, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, holding it in until she could trust herself to speak.

“Thanks for the tour, Yannik,” she said. “Thanks for sharing your planet with me.” She stood up quickly and took one last, lingering look at the multicolored pearl beds. “I’ll be around tomorrow, and the day after that. After that… who knows? One day at a time.”

Yannik stood and smiled wistfully. His eyes were unreadable, dark beneath the brim of his cap. “Sure, Cara,” he said. “I’ll see you then. I’m not going anywhere.”

He walked her back up the gangplank and back to his shrimp stand. They paused there a moment, and Cara felt something slipping through her fingers, something vast and amorphous and shimmering with unseen power. She groped for it but could not get a grip. “Goodnight, Yannik,” she said, her voice suddenly hoarse. She turned and headed for home.


	5. Promenade

Cara awoke slowly, rising out of a half-remembered dream. There had been flowers, she could recall that much, their scent filling the air. Memories of the day before hung heavy on her: happy memories for the most part, but tinged with bittersweet in a way she couldn’t quite define. She shook off her malaise and headed to the mess for breakfast.

Pell was already there. He’d stumbled home even later than her last night, and she hadn’t had to ask why—he was practically floating on a cloud this morning. She didn’t want to puncture his good mood, but if she didn’t rib him a _little_ , he’d wonder if she had gone soft.

“How’d your date go?” she asked him over a bowl of nutrimix. Pell waggled his eyebrows and retrieved another one of his foul roll-ups from behind his ear, which seemed to contain an infinite supply of them. “A lady never asks,” he said, tucking it into his lip and producing a wooden match, “and a gentleman never tells.” He puffed out a cloud of smoke and tucked into his own breakfast. “Anyways, I could ask you the same question.”

“It wasn’t a date,” Cara scowled. She surprised herself with her vehemence. “Mr. Raow was just showing me the city. Also, he has a fried shrimp stand you _need_ to check out. Beats the hell out of this snot.” She shoved her bowl away from her. It was true: after a few tastes of Yannik’s shrimp, she’d come to resent the Republic ration paste. “Flavorless” would have been an upgrade.

Pell only shrugged. “Suit yourself. Pira’s a wonderful girl, like I said. Very sweet. Easy to talk to.”

“Yeah, as long as you don’t go multi-syllabic, right?” Cara snorted.

“Mean. And inaccurate. She was teaching me stuff about High Period Mandalorian tone-poetry.”

“Stuff like, does it exist, what is it, that sort of thing?”

Pell hesitated. “Well, to start with. But seriously, Cara, she’s a nice girl. Anyways, why do you care? You’re not… _jealous_?” He ducked to one side in time to dodge a hurled spoonful of nutrimix. “Ah! Gotta be quicker than that. Today’s a big day. Put your game face on.”

“Oh? What’s today?” Cara was suddenly intrigued. The prospect of having something to distract herself with appealed quite a bit right now.

“Governor-General Kerskyan arrives tomorrow, remember? So today is all security sweeps. If someone blows him away, we’re all gonna be in deep bantha crap. Sergeant Reits will be _displeased_.”

“Shit! That’s tomorrow?” Cara cursed herself internally for losing track of time. “What are we doing today?”

“Attention!” Sergeant Reits’s amplified voice boomed out of the comm-speakers. “All active duty personnel, please report to the briefing theater. All active-duty personnel, report to the briefing theater.”

Cara and Pell shuffled in together and took their seats side by side on a mid-level bench. The briefing theater was arranged in a stepped bowl, with the troopers sitting on rings of benches around a central pit. Reits stood in the pit, holding a commlink and a stack of papers. Behind him were the two ranking officers of the deployment: Captain Fithiur, a Bothan male with glossy black fur, and the Sullustan Major Diul Wykk. Reits looked as nervous as Cara had ever seen him.

“As you know,” he began, “tomorrow, Governor-General Juibla Kerskyan arrives. I’m sure you have heard about this Sons of Capridor business. The Governor-General has his own security detachment, but we are going to perform a _complete_ sweep of his procession route today. That means spaceport to the grand promenade, and all the way to the Palazza, plus environs. And _that_ means double shifts for everyone.” He waited for the chorus of groans to die out. “All right, all right. But remember: the Governor-General has his own security detachment. Naval security corps, those tightarse bastards. Are we gonna be made to look like idiots by the void jockeys?”

“No!” the troopers thundered, Cara as loud as the rest of them.

“Are we gonna show them how it’s done?”

“Yeah!” This time, the cheer reached the ceiling.

“You’re damn right we are! So let’s get going. Move out by squads. This is just a sweep, so try not to scare anyone, but be ready for trouble. And if you run into any, try to leave enough behind to interrogate.” He clapped his hands and the holoscreen behind him switched to a list of names. “Aurek squad, you’ll take the blocks shaded in green. Besh squad, you have the area shaded in red…”

Cara didn’t love the assignment she was given, but her eyes lit up when Sergeant Reits opened up the armory. “How long have we had _this_?” she asked, cradling a BlasTech TH-X1 rotator cannon in both hands. The cannon’s distinctive dual barrels gleamed under the glowstrips, as though they’d never been fired. Two stout ammunition drums on either side of the stock gave it a bulky weight that sat comfortably in her hands.

“You like that, Dune?” Reits asked. “Take it. It’s good for clearing. Just don’t let it rip unless you’re _really, really_ sure there aren’t any civilians downrange. That thing will go right through walls.”

“Roger that, sir,” Cara said. She hefted the gun and shrugged its gundark-leather strap over her shoulders. She grabbed a half dozen spare drums and dropped them in a musette bag.

Pell had opted for his ordinary blaster rifle, but he looked her cannon up and down and let out a low whistle. “Not bad, Cara,” he said. “I don’t envy you toting that thing around, but not bad. Can I touch it?”

“Ok, but be gentle,” Cara replied. “It’s my first time.”

“Oooh, the barrel is so long and hard,” Pell cooed, stroking his palm across it. “Please, Miss Big Rebel Trooper, could you—“

Reits loomed behind him like an angry Wookiee. “Don’t make me regret giving you that thing, Dune,” he growled. “Move out.”

Cara left the gun strapped across her back during the walk through the city. She was starting to feel its weight, but she couldn’t exactly give it back now. Besides, carrying the thing was good exercise. Her squad of six spread into three pairs—in front, Troopers Ixil and Kart; in the middle, her and Pell; bringing up the rear, Troopers Ekweh and Sien. It didn’t take long for them all to be on edge. Cara could feel it, a sort of electricity in the air. There weren’t many people on the streets, and those that she did see gave her frightened, furtive looks. She wondered if they knew something, or if they were just feeling the same tension.

One by one, they knocked on the doors of businesses and apartment buildings. Some owners were patient, others hostile, but the result was always the same: the troopers marched methodically from floor to floor and from room to room, trailing a cadre of bomb-sniffer and scanner droids behind them. The little droids, barely larger than the mouse droids so beloved of the Imperial navy, chittered and beeped to each other as they swept through the corridors. Occasional frightened faces peeked out at the troopers from behind doors that quickly closed behind them. Whenever the droids chirruped that they’d found something, Cara’s squad would have to knock on the door and conduct a brief investigation. Nobody subject to these investigations was pleased to see them, and Cara quickly grew tired of the angry stares and muttered curses.

The sun had already crested and was starting to descend, and they were barely halfway through their route. Cara had certainly underestimated how long this would take. Her hands were drenched in sweat beneath her gloves, and her neck was starting to develop a crick from the weight of the rotator cannon. She was sure that Pell was no happier, but he seemed perfectly sanguine, smoking one of his foul cigarras and walking along at a steady march. They’d just turned into an alley when the lead scanner droid stopped in place and let out a warble.

“What’s that?” Cara asked. The other droids began to whir in a tight orbit around their leader, beeping and trilling. Cara looked over at Trooper Sien. The little Sullustan was fiddling with the control pad for the droids. He looked it up and down, then turned to Cara.

“Strong return, Dune. That building.” He indicated with his finger the looming tenement to their left. The building was ancient, its wall crumbling brickwork. The door Cara could see was boarded up, but even the board were old and rotten.

“What’s in there?” she asked. “Homes?” She hoped not. Tramping through people’s living rooms had lost its appeal.

“It’s supposed to be abandoned,” Trooper Kart said. He was scrolling through his own datapad. “Last twenty years at least. It’s structurally unsound.”

Cara unshipped her cannon. “Let’s go, then. We’d have to check it anyways. Sounds like the perfect place for a sniper nest.”

“It’s unsound,” Kart repeated. “Maybe we just send the droids in, and—”

“And get them blown to scrap by Sons of Capridor? No thank you. We’ll just take a look inside, and if it starts to get creaky, we can report it up the chain. Deal?”

“Fine,” Kart said, after a brief hesitation.

“And I’ll take point.” Cara didn’t wait for confirmation on that score but approached the door. She tugged at the boards lying across it and they came right off in her hand. “See, look at this. This wasn’t even nailed on. Someone’s been using this door recently.” She pushed it open with the barrel of her gun. It swung easily, without any of the rusted creak she might have expected.

She was on edge from the moment she stepped inside. Once she was looking for them, the signs of frequent use were too obvious to ignore. Dust that had been inexpertly swept to conceal footprints. A crumpled food wrapper, far newer and fresher than the rest of the detritus. A pile of crates stacked up to form a makeshift staircase that led up into a hole in the floor above. The interior of the building had been mostly gutted, leaving it a warren of half-collapsed walls and exposed support pillars. Cara led the way, clambering up the crates and through the hole.

This level was in ruins, too, but someone had fastidiously cleaned up part of it. Debris had been shoved aside to create a narrow walkway, and wooden props supported the sagging ceiling in places. The rest of the troopers fell silent without anyone having to give the order. The oppressive tension from before was back, and worse than ever. Cara could feel it creeping up her spine. She tried to calm her breathing so she could hear. The building groaned slightly as it settled. Was that a footfall? The click of a blaster arming? Or was it just an abandoned tenement house sagging into its foundations?

Was someone living here? She saw no blankets, no clothes, no evidence of habitation. There was a small camp stove, but no stores of food or fuel. Many of the tenement’s windows were boarded, but those that weren’t had been blocked inexpertly from within, sheets of flakboard laid across them and held in place with steel staples punched directly into the ferrocrete.

Pell got her attention with a wave and pointed. A thick trunk of cable snaked into the room through a side door and out through another. Cara peered through the doorway from which it had come. A hallway stretched away in front of her, its ancient carpet moldering, but what caught her attention were the stairs at the near end. They had very clearly been repaired recently—the lower steps shone with the glisten of fresh duraplas. The cable trailed away up the stairs.

Cara pointed at herself, Pell, and Trooper Kart, and then at the staircase. She pointed at the other three, then indicated the door in the far wall, the one the cable left through. Pell shook his head and swept his hand in a circle to take in the full squad. The implication was obvious. _Don’t split up. Too risky_.

Cara wasn’t going to be put off, though. She pointed upstairs, then mimed running with two fingers across the palm of her left hand and pointed down through the hole. _If we alert them upstairs, anyone on this floor will be able to escape._

Pell thought for a moment, then pointed at the rotator cannon and the doorframe. He crouched down and held out his own blaster in a textbook “covering fire” posture. Cara realized what he was suggesting and groaned under her breath. He was right, though. The piles of debris in this room provided excellent cover, and there were only two entrances, both of which could be covered from the same vantage point. They could leave someone behind to hold the room and ensure no insurgents could escape. And the rotator cannon’s withering rate of fire made her the perfect candidate for that role.

The only problem was, that would require Cara to stay behind. To let her squad advance into unknown danger without her. She’d led them into this building, and now they were the ones putting themselves on the firing line. But she was a professional. Glory hounds didn’t last too long among the droppers.

She settled into cover behind a broken chunk of masonry. It was the work of a moment to clear away enough rubble for her gun. She checked the feed on her cannon and toggled off the safety. A low whine built in the arming chamber as the gas cylinders spun up their lethal contents.

Pell shot her a thumbs-up, which she returned. “May the Force be with you,” she mouthed. The rest of the troopers fell into step behind him in a loose clearing formation. It was funny how things came back to you, Cara reflected. They hadn’t deployed into combat in months, but the old instincts were all still there, just waiting to be woken up by the right combination of stress, fear and determination. She watched their receding backs disappear one by one.

From there on, all she had was sound. The squeak of bending duraplas had to be Pell stepping onto the staircase. It was impossible to climb silently, which Cara supposed was the point. The softer thump was the squad reaching the landing on top. It sounded like bare ferrocrete up there. She heard footsteps, slow and cautious, and a gentle click like a hand turning a doorknob. She realized she was holding her breath and forced herself to exhale.

_Easy now_ , she willed. _Let there be nothing there. Let this all be some stupid hunch._ More clicks, and the creak of warped, decrepit hinges. A heavy, repeating thump, which startled Cara until she realized it was her own heartbeat echoing in her ears.

One more click. A faint squeal of metal on metal. A sharp _snap_ , the sound of a line breaking under tension.

An explosion. A roar of heat and fire that filled the silence and knocked Cara on her butt. For a moment, she thought she might have imagined it, then a great cloud of dust billowed down the staircase and in through the door. Before the echoes had even died away, the shrill scream of blaster bolts filled the air. Republic blasters, the workhorse A280s, had a distinctive sound: a kind of keening whine. She heard some of those, but also the _snap-crack_ of an old-style Czerka sidearm and even the hissing backwash of a fusion weapon.

Along with the sudden storm of blaster fire, she heard voices, muffled by distance and the intervening walls: grunts, yelps, the occasional scream. There was a distant rumble and the building shook slightly. Dust sifted down from the ceiling. Cara leaned forward, her heart pounding, her finger on the trigger. Her eyes darted from one door the other. She had to hold down here, she knew, in case the enemy tried to escape. She had to keep her position. She had to-

“Ah, screw this!” she said aloud and vaulted over her makeshift barricade. She slung her cannon over her shoulder, double checked that the safety was off, and stormed out into the hallway. A haze of dust hung in the air and stung her eyes. She blinked it away, put her head down and began to climb the stairs. She could see Pell and Trooper Ekweh crouched at the top of the staircase, squeezing off shots from their rifles. There was Kart, flattened against the landing wall. She couldn’t see Ixil or Sien, but from somewhere ahead of her she could hear the sound of an A280 firing in tight, three-round bursts.

Pell looked around and caught her eye when she was halfway up the stairs. “How many?” she mouthed. She wasn’t sure if the insurgents would be able to hear her over the roar of blaster fire, but she didn’t want to take any chances.

_Unknown_ , Pell signed back, using the hand signals shocktroopers on deployment had learned to communicate silently. _Friendly in line of fire. Exercise caution_.

Cara nodded and keyed her commlink. She tapped the page button three times. At Pell’s belt, his commlink blurted out three quick bursts of static. This was a nonverbal signal, too, one that Cara had frequently had occasion to use. _Get down. Supporting fire incoming. Take cover._

Up ahead, the A280 fired one last burst and fell silent. Cara hoped that Ixil or whoever it was had withdrawn to cover and not gotten hit. She crouched down below the top of the stairs and hefted her cannon. Overhead, blaster bolts flurried past her and thumped into the far wall, coring out divots in the aged ferrocrete. She waited and listened for a moment, trying to discern some pattern in the fire. There—it momentarily ebbed, as though the unseen assailants were reloading or repositioning.

Cara didn’t waste a moment. She squeezed the cannon’s trigger just as its barrel crested the lip of the stairs. The drums cycled up to full speed in milliseconds and the cannon’s two barrels glowed cherry-red. The cannon wailed like a damned soul and sprayed the far end of the hallway with a stream of red. The return fire slackened immediately, and Cara could faintly hear cries of distress over the sound of her gun. She stitched a punishing pattern of fire back and forth for a sustained ten seconds. At the end of the hallway, the meager cover the insurgents had been using blew out and collapsed. A fallen table shuddered and disintegrated into pulpy fragments. She hit something with its own power source, perhaps a generator or a discarded blaster, and a minor explosion rocked the end of the hallway. A great cloud of dust swirled up into the air and obscured her vision. She let her finger fall off the trigger and the cannon’s wail guttered down to a low whine. Silence descended.

Cara’s ears were still ringing from the roar of the cannon, so she didn’t hear what Pell said next. She saw him, though, leaping to his feet and striding into the cloud. She followed at once. The insurgents could not be allowed to escape. But Pell wasn’t interested in following them. He stopped halfway down the hallway and stooped to pick something up. At first Cara couldn’t tell what he was holding.

Trooper Ixil lay bloody and broken on the hallway floor. Both lenses of his respirator mask had shattered, revealing the insectile face beneath. Blast force had torn away the front of his armor and flayed his chest. Yellow blood trickled down his front and poured out of his slack mouth. Pell cradled the Gand in his arms, but from the way his body moved, Cara knew that he was already gone.

“What happened?” Cara asked. “I heard—”

“Booby trap.” Pell’s face looked like it was carved out of stone. “They were waiting for us.”

“Where’s Sien?” Cara asked. “Is he ok?”

The Sullustan emerged from the dust cloud. He had a nasty-looking blaster burn across one shoulder of his uniform, but waved off any offers of first aid. “We have to go after them,” he said. “Now, before they get away!”

Following the insurgents was easy enough. They’d cleared another path through the rubble on this level, and the cable from earlier was as good as a landing beacon. The squad followed it to a large, mostly empty room in the back of the building. A legless power droid sat against one wall, with the cable socketed into its base. There were also a half-dozen crates against the far wall. Most of them were half-empty, as though they’d been looted in a hurry, but the remaining contents were enough to sour Cara’s stomach. Blasters, grenades, sniper scopes, commlinks that looked like they’d been stripped down and rebuilt. Pell fished one of these out and scowled at it.

“No location transponder. No CID chip, either. If you’re not on the right frequency, you wouldn’t even know this thing existed.”

Most distressing of all, the back wall was dominated by a massive bay window, its glass long missing. There was another rooftop less than two meters below, and Cara could just see a ladder at the far end. At the bottom of the ladder, she had no doubt, would be another twisty little alley surrounded by a maze of them. Their quarry were long, long gone.

Reits arrived quickly once they called for backup, and he didn’t come alone. Three squads of troopers, with droid backup, dispersed to search the building from basement to rooftop. Cara suspected they wouldn’t find anything. The insurgents wouldn’t be stupid enough to locate their entire operation in one abandoned tenement house.

She hung around anyways. There was a dull ache in the back of her head, and a lump in her throat. She wanted to find the people responsible for this. Find them and hurt them. What was she supposed to do against this faceless enemy, though? Hadn’t they won the war?

She was still standing around when the medics brought Ixil out. In the daylight, he looked even smaller than he had inside, a far cry from the proud Republic trooper she remembered. He looked reduced, as though death had shriveled him. She’d lost people before, but not like this. This seemed like such a small and mean death, without purpose or redemption.

Reits bowed his head and Cara followed suit. The medic laid Ixil down on a body bag and began to zip it shut. It was easier when she didn’t have to look at him. It was easier to push sorrow aside, and think of vengeance.

“Good job, Trooper,” said a voice at her ear. She looked up to see Captain Fithiur standing just behind her. She snapped to attention and saluted, but he waved her to ease.

“I heard it was your idea to investigate this building?” he asked. Cara swallowed and nodded.

“Sir, I’m sorry. I—”

“No need to be sorry, Dune,” Fithiur said. “You uncovered a nest of rebels.” She blinked. There was that word again. She supposed they _were_ rebels, but calling them so sat uneasily on her tongue. “Because of your actions today, these plotters were unable to carry out their assassination attempt on the Governor-General. You should be proud.”

“We suffered losses, sir,” Pell said. He stepped forward and saluted. His face was still unreadable, set in a grimace. “Trooper Ixil. Killed by a bomb.”

“Yes, I heard.” Captain Fithiur ran one hand through the sleek fur of his forehead. “He will be missed.”

“With respect, sir, how will we respond? Are we going to let his death go unanswered?”

“I don’t want to, either, trooper, but the enemy has escaped,” Fithiur replied. “We’re tracking them now. Unless you have a better suggestion…”

“Hostages.” Pell resolutely avoided Cara’s gaze. “Five for every one of us who dies. Or ten. It can be just fighting-age men if you want. The killers have one rotation to come forward.”

“Or what?” Fithiur looked mildly horrified.

“Or we execute them.” Pell stood ramrod-straight. He met the Captain’s disbelieving stare with a blank one of his own.

“You can’t be serious, Trooper,” Fithiur said after a moment. “I understand that you’re in shock, and I’ll forgive this outburst, but we’re not barbarians. I don’t ever want to hear you say something like that again, do you understand me?”

“Yes sir. Permission to visit the medics for examination, sir.” Pell saluted again. Fithiur stared at him for a moment longer, then waved him off.

Cara followed Pell to the medic. She didn’t think she was wounded, but right now she didn’t want to be standing around with nothing to do. She took the camp chair next to him in the medic’s tent and for a while they sat in silence.

She broke it first. “Pell, I…” she began, and trailed off. What was she even trying to say? “I’m sorry about Ixil.”

“Me, too,” he said. He still wouldn’t look at her.

“No, I mean, it’s my fault. I led the squad in there.”

“Did you shoot him?” Pell shook his head. “No? It wasn’t your fault. These people chose to pick a fight with the Republic. They own the consequences.”

“Consequences…” Cara trailed off again. “Pell, were you serious? About the hostages?”

“Of course.” He finally looked over at her. Cara searched his face for some clue, some trace that the old Pell she’d joked with had been overtaken, and found nothing. He was the same as ever, a wry look in his eye, his lip twitching with the promise of sudden, unpredictable mirth. Except for the words he was saying, he was every inch her old friend. “Cara, this is a war, whether you like it or not. War is hard and it requires us to be hard, too. Remember Eadu? The sentries? We couldn’t leave them tied up. We couldn’t spare a guard.”

“That was different,” Cara insisted. “They were soldiers. They knew what they signed up for.”

“The people of Capridor have signed up to help these… _Sons_.” Contempt dripped from Pell’s voice. “They have to learn that that has consequences, too. There’s no bystanders in a war.”

“Pell, what about Pira? What would she think?”

He shrugged. “She’d probably hate me. That would be upsetting. But I’m a soldier, Cara. I swore an oath. I’m not suggesting this because I like the idea, I’m suggesting it because I think it will work. It doesn’t matter, anyways. You saw old Fithiur’s face. He’d never do it in a million years. Hell, I probably torpedoed my career just by suggesting it.” He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I know what I signed up for, too.”

Cara didn’t have a response to that, so she just sat in silence. One by one, the medic examined her and Pell and pronounced them fit and healthy. By that time, the sweep of the building had been completed, and security droids were wrapping the perimeter in exclusion wire and Keep Out tape.

“We’ve got more checking to do,” Reits said. “Not you two. Your squad is off duty for the night. Try to get some rest. Tomorrow’s the big day. After this mess, you know there’s going to be trouble with the Governor’s landing. We have to be ready for it.”

Cara only nodded. She couldn’t imagine going out in uniform again tomorrow. And the day after? And the day after that? Was this what it was going to be like, forever? Was this a war after all?

She saluted and turned for home.


	6. The Big Day

The dress uniform was one thing. It was uncomfortable and ridiculous looking, and it made Cara feel like a toy soldier. But she’d have worn it in a heartbeat—would have marched up and down the grand promenade, in front of the whole city—if it meant she never had to suit up in riot gear again.

Standard-issue New Republic riot gear was bulky. It was awkward. It was hotter than a Tatooine noon, despite the built-in cooling fans, and Cara knew she’d be drenched in sweat before long. But the worst part of wearing it was having to look at herself in the mirror. The riot gear helmet covered her full face, with a narrow transparisteel visor. The brow sloped downward to deflect projectiles, and a speaker grille covered her mouth. It made her look like a Force-damned buckethead, and _that_ was what she hated most of all. She dressed with a sick, crawling feeling in the pit of her stomach, and it only got worse when she saw what she looked like suited up.

They’d all been issued heavy riot shields and shock batons. Some bright spark at HQ had recognized that live ammunition was asking for trouble, so their blasters had all been replaced by stunguns—ugly-looking rifles that dispersed wide-angle stunrings with the pull of a trigger. The fact that their guns were technically nonlethal did not make Cara feel any better about deploying them against civilians. She’d been stunned, both during basic training and on missions, and she’d always hated it. The numbness faded quickly when the paralysis wore off, but the nausea could last for hours.

She tried to convince herself that they wouldn’t need to do more than look menacing. The entire barracks was on high alert after Ixil’s death. A sweep of the building had turned up several caches of weapons and high explosives, but no trace of the perpetrators. Fithiur was deploying troops into every abandoned building that overlooked the parade route, but his garrison was only so large, and he had insisted on providing an escort for the Governor-General. What’s worse, the news had come down that Kerskyan would be giving a speech upon his arrival in the Kingsveld. Outside, in one of the biggest public spaces in the city. He had a personal shield, but if Cara was organizing the assassination of an Imperial planetary governor, she knew where and when she’d take her shot.

“Freeze, Rebel scum!” A mic-amplified voice boomed out behind her. She whirled, shock baton raised, to see Pell aiming his stunner at her. He was only recognizable due to the serial number on his shield—every inch of skin was covered. Cara, annoyed, knocked his barrel away with her baton.

“Not funny, Pell.”

"Oh, come on, Cara,” he complained. Even altered by the helmet grille, his wheedling tone was familiar. “Haven’t you ever wondered what it’s like to be a buckethead?”

“Not even once,” Cara replied. “It feels like crap, is what it feels like. Makes me think if they _knew_ they were the bad guys when they suited up.”

“Oh, come off it,” he said. “We’re not the bad guys. We’re just working security. They didn’t even give me anything that could kill someone.” He hefted his baton and looked at its heavy tip. “Although…”

“I don’t feel too great about zapping the balls off some dumb lumberjack or shrimp fisherman who gets a little too excited,” Cara said. “And I really don’t feel great about looking like an Imp while I do it. I thought things were supposed to change once we won the war, huh?”

"Lighten up, Cara,” Pell said. “It’s just a job. Don’t let it get too personal. We’re not the Empire. We’re not blowing up anyone’s planet. We’re just keeping the peace. Once the Capridorians get it through their thick skulls that the Republic isn’t going away, they’ll settle down and play nice.”

Cara said nothing. She wondered how Pell was able to turn it on and off so easily. Yesterday, he’d been talking about executing hostages. Today, he was joking with her like nothing had happened, like Ixil wasn’t lying on a slab in the barracks morgue. Had he always been like that? Had _she_ , back in the war days?

What had changed?

“I just want to get through this without anything going seriously wrong,” Cara finally replied.

“Ah, the soldier’s favorite prayer,” said Pell. He chuckled. “Well, I’m right there with you. If one of Pira’s brothers or uncles or something gets rowdy and I have to bonk him between the eyes, I’ll never hear the end of it. So let’s have a nice, quiet day, then come home and take two hour showers. The sweat! I swear I’m drowning already.”

Cara’s platoon assembled on the tarmac at the spaceport. There were two dozen of them in total, four squads. The rest had been deployed along the parade route to keep order. Captain Fithiur put the city constabulary on crowd control—none of the Republic troops trusted them, especially not after yesterday. The other barracks, the one in Oldtown, had deployed sweeper squads to every building along the route, and _Mon Ekidna_ was monitoring all air traffic into and out of the capital. With luck, it would be enough.

Governor-General Kerskyan’s arrival was heralded by a flyover: five X-wings in tight formation, their S-foils locked in attack position. They swept overhead with a sonic boom and broke apart, circling back to recreate their formation in perfect unison. One by one, they waggled their wings in salute, then peeled off above the clouds. The Governor-General’s shuttle descended with majestic slowness. With its wings unfurled, it looked like a seabird swooping down to take its meal. The X-wings settled into escort formation around it and circled slowly, like Loth cats guarding their precious cub.

The shuttle set down on the tarmac with a _hiss_ of venting steam. The first figures down its ramp were a dozen Naval Security troops: faceless in their black armor, clutching snubnose blaster carbines. They jogged into two lines and turned to address each other with clockwork precision. All twelve snapped off precise salutes, and Cara shuddered inside her armor. She knew she looked like a buckethead in this gear, but at least she was embarrassed about it. Naval Security seemed to positively _revel_ in their sinister black silhouettes. Spending too much time in space messed with you.

The Governor-General himself descended slowly, step by step. Cara craned her neck to get a good look at him. What she saw left her vaguely disappointed: after all of this buildup, she’d expected someone truly larger-than-life. Kerskyan was just a man, a human of average height and build with close-cropped black hair and a prominent chin. He wore a white-and-gold uniform that looked vaguely military, though it wasn’t any rank Cara had ever seen.

Captain Fithiur and Major Wykk met him at the foot of the ramp and all three saluted each other. They carried on a brief conversation, then Fithiur’s voice crackled to life in Cara’s ear. The riot helmets were equipped with internal commlinks, and she winced at the sudden noise. There had to be a volume knob somewhere, but she hadn’t found it while suiting up.

“Attention, platoon! Squads Aurek and Besh will move out behind myself and Major Wykk! Squads Cresh and Dorn will form up behind the Governor-General and his escort. Maintain a tight spread and don’t allow anyone through the outer perimeter. You’re professionals, you know how this works. Fall in!”

Cara hefted her shield and re-checked the charge on her baton. She took a couple of deep breaths. Go time.

Captain Fithiur took point and set a steady marching pace. Cara had to hand it to the old Bothan—he hadn’t rested on his laurels after his promotion. He wasn’t wearing the full riot getup, but armor plates covered his waist, calves, arms and chest, and he wore a half-helmet. Major Wykk was likewise attired, though she rode on a hoverdisc rather than try to keep pace on her short legs.

Near the spaceport, the procession traveled uninterrupted, but as soon as they hit the grand promenade Cara’s stomach sank. Her hopes for a quiet, peaceful outing already looked doomed. People lined the walk on both sides, glaring angrily at the Republic forces. It would be better if they were hooting and jeering, Cara thought. City people were always up for a good jeer, especially if the target looked particularly pompous. The Capridorians just watched them in grim silence. Their eyes seemed to be marking the troopers, as though trying to memorize them for later. For once, Cara found herself grateful for the face-covering mask.

The crowd thickened as they marched deeper into the city. Here and there, someone would boo or curse the Governor as he passed. Cara tensed as they passed beneath the tenement house from the other day, but she could see New Republic troops standing in the empty windows. The sight cheered her up a little. The Sons of Capridor might be planning something, but the Republic was ready.

Their pace slowed as they approached the Kingsveld. Here, the crowds were truly thick. The city constables pushed back at the crowd of people with what Cara considered to be a half-hearted effort at best. They’d erected a few barriers, but these were doing little to stem the human tide. When the Republic troopers marched past, the looks they got from the constables were barely friendlier than those of the other locals.

One look at the Kingsveld sent a shiver of impending doom up Cara’s spine. A stage with a podium sat in the exact middle of the square, surrounded on all sides by Capridorian kings. This, at least, had solid durasteel fencing around it, broken only by two gates. The crowd parted before them without Cara having to swing her baton, though she did have to the nudge the occasional over-eager protestor aside with the lip of her shield. From time to time, some especially daring Capridorian would dart out of the crowd to touch the fence, as though claiming some trophy. Cara surveyed the mass of people with a sinking feeling. There were families here, some with children. A half-dozen peddlers hawked hot food and cold beverages from coolers slung around their necks. She did not see Yannik among them, which was a minor blessing. Hopefully he had the good sense to stay away.

If Kerskyan noticed the hostility he was provoking, he did not show any sign of it. He ascended the podium and cleared his throat. His voice boomed out of speakers set in a ring around the edge of the stage, and an expectant hush fell over the crowd. Cara and the other Republic troops fanned out inside the fenced perimeter, forming a protective circle. The governor was still dreadfully exposed to any sniper with a good eye, but at least if someone tried to get close, they were ready to stop him. The black-armored Naval Security forces interspersed themselves between the shocktroopers. One of them stood next to Cara, and she snuck a glance at his carbine. She couldn’t tell if those guns were set to stun or kill, but neither would have surprised her. What bothered her more was that the Naval troops had their own comm channel. Cara could hear the whisper and crackle of static inside her neighbor’s helmet, but nothing on her own band. She didn’t like that. It wasn’t good operational practice, splitting one force into two like that, and she didn’t trust them either.

“People of Capridor!” Kerskyan began. “I am honored to be welcomed to your fair city, on your beautiful planet!”

A chorus of boos met his opening line. “Go home!” shouted one man. “We don’t want you here!” a woman screamed at the top of her lungs. Someone in the back of the crowd yelled “Rebel scum!” and a few people closer to the stage took up the chant like a mantra. Kerskyan let them subside into silence before continuing.

“As I was saying, your planet is beautiful, and I am proud to help make it a part of the New Republic. Together, we can assure that Capridor’s future will be as vibrant as its past. Together, we can hold hands, and step forward into a bright—”

“Booooo!” This came from a heavyset man in a sweat-stained shirt. He staggered slightly, and his face was flushed red. “Filthy rebs! Killed my brother!” He clutched a brown paper bag in one hand, and Cara didn’t have to think hard to guess what was in it. Sure enough, he threw it to the ground just outside the fence, where it made a sound like shattering glass. “Get off our planet!”

Kerskyan tried to ignore this interruption, but the mood was turning decidedly ugly. A half dozen other people jeered, and the red-faced man grabbed onto the barricade and started to climb. A trooper—Cara wasn’t sure who under the armor, but she thought it might have been Ekweh—thrust the head of his baton into the climber’s stomach. There was a loud _crack_ and a sudden whiff of ozone, and he went flying backwards. He landed on his back on the cobbles, clutching his stomach and screaming his head off.

“I’m kilt!” the man hollered. “I’m kilt! Damn rebs kilt me!” A nearby woman rushed out of the crowd and knelt by his side. He was obviously alive, as his loud bawling could testify, but the rest of the crowd seemed to take this as a provocation. No, not a crowd, Cara decided. Now they were a mob.

Capridorians surged forward on all sides. The constables seemed to have vanished, and Cara had the ugly suspicion that some of them were surreptitiously ditching their uniforms. Nobody else tried for the fence, but they got as close as they could, waving their fists in the air and shouting slogans. “Rebels out!” screamed a woman younger than Cara, inches from her visor. “Capridor endures!” yelled someone else.

In seconds, all other slogans had been forgotten. “Capridor endures!” the crowd chanted. “Capridor endures!” The mass of people crushed inward. Some in the front wore panicked expressions, but they could not escape out through the press behind them. Others were too lost to fury to feel any fear.

“Capridor endures!” This voice was high-pitched and reedy. Cara looked down and startled back in surprise. Standing mere inches from the barricade was the blonde boy from the other day, the one who had played Darth Vader. His face was contorted in a rictus of hatred. “Capridor endures!” he shouted again, and bunched his hands into fists. “Get off my planet, you damn rebs!” Behind him, a blonde, heavyset man who could only be his father was yelling too.

“You tell ‘em, Jayden!” he whooped. “Capridor endures!”

Cara felt sick to the pit of her stomach. She held up her shield and cocked her other wrist back, prepared to deploy her baton. Her thumb rested on the trigger pad. She wouldn’t hit a kid, but if his dad looked like he was going to make a try for the stage, she’d be happy to leave him regretting it. He seemed content to stand there and shout, but the pressure of the crowd was still building.

Captain Fithiur’s voice crackled in her ear. “Hold the line, troops,” he said. He sounded terrified. “Batons and shields _only_. Do not cross the fenceline. That is an order.”

Somewhere to her left, a missile hurled out of the crowd. Cara never saw what it was. A cobblestone? A chunk of masonry? Whatever it was, it bounced off Republic trooper’s riot shield. A half-second layer, a volley of debris followed it: stones, rotten fruit, dead fish, clods of dirt torn up from the flowerbeds around the square. The shocktroopers raised their shields in a phalanx to weather the storm. Some of the projectiles landed on the stage, and Kerskyan shied back from them. He was surrounded on all sides, though, with nowhere to retreat. “People,” he cried, his voice echoing across the square. “People, please…”

A ballistic paving stone hit a Naval Security trooper square in the forehead with a _thok_. Her helmeted head snapped around and she collapsed like a stunned nerf. Before Cara could respond, the Naval Security trooper next to her raised his carbine and aimed it into the crowd, in the rough direction of where the stone had come from. “Wait, no—” Cara cried, but the roar of the mob swallowed up her voice. The trooper pulled the trigger and a bolt of red energy spat from the muzzle of his gun.

In a flash, the angry cries of the mob turned to panicked screams. The press of people scattered as Capridorians who had been protesting a moment before turned to flee. A long, low moan rolled from one end of the square to the other, the sound of thousands of people panicking at once. Cara turned and slammed her shock baton into the trooper’s gun barrel. “You idiot!” she screamed, not even caring if he could hear her. “Murdering idiot!”

Her commlink burst into life again. “We’re withdrawing to the Palazza,” Fithiur said. “All troopers, clear a path. Protect the Governor-General at all costs.” He paused. “Lethal force authorized if absolutely necessary. _Only_ if absolutely necessary.”

The Republic formation collapsed around the Governor-General. A half-dozen troopers held up their shields to shelter him from the incoming barrage of rocks and rotten food. Cara found herself on the outside of the formation, shoulder-to-shoulder with Trooper Juwann. The two of them pressed forward one step at a time, shoving with their shields when necessary. Trooper Juwann hefted her baton and jabbed forward with it, leaving any Capridorians too slow to dodge reeling and dazed. Cara could feel impacts against her shield and her armored back: nothing heavy enough to knock her over yet, but plenty enough to keep her rattled. The press of bodies on all sides was intense. She could feel the heat of them, smell the stink rising off them: grime and tangy stink of fear-sweat. Or maybe that was her. Her world had collapsed down to the width of her visor and the length of one step.

A figure loomed out of the crowd in front of her: the blonde man from earlier, Jayden’s father. Thankfully his son was nowhere to be seen. Cara hoped the boy’s mother had had the good sense to get him out of the square. The father was snarling, enraged. His blonde hair was mussed and blood trickled from a cut on his forehead.

He cocked an arm back, and Cara caught a glimpse of the stone in his fist. She didn’t hesitate. Her baton thumped into his side with a flare of lightning and a sharp _crack_. The blonde man’s eyes widened and he staggered a few steps backwards, the stone dropping from his fingers. He clutched his side and crumpled to the ground. Cara shoved him aside with the lip of her shield and pressed forward. Another man leapt at her, and she met him with her shield. The weight of him drove her back a step, but she jabbed back with her shock baton and sent him reeling.

Little by little, the formation crossed the square, leaving a litter of bruised and moaning Capridorians behind them. Overhead, the stone kings stared blankly down at them. Cara could feel the weight of their disapproval. _I’m sorry_ , she thought desperately. _We have no choice. I’m sorry._

It took nearly half an hour for the last of them to leave the square, by which point the crowd had mostly dispersed. The stage had been utterly ruined, torn to shreds with its fences toppled. Of the podium there was no trace at all. Filth and rotten food littered the wreckage. Bodies lay where they had fallen. Cara hoped that they were all just unconscious. She’d clubbed down her fair share of angry people during their flight, though she’d tried to pull her punches.

The Republic procession regrouped in the Palazza, which still showed scars from the earlier attack. The window the bomb had come in through was covered floor to ceiling by a plastic sheet, leaving that corner of the room in gloom. The heavy double doors in the front of the building closed with a resounding _boom_ and the distant sounds of fury faded into nothingness.

Once they were all inside, Cara pulled off her helmet. Sweat matted her hair to her forehead. She tossed her shield and baton down and sat on one of the benches. It creaked beneath her armored weight, but held, at least for now.

She only noticed Pell when he cleared his throat. He stood over her, his own helmet off, leaning on his deactivated shock baton like a walking stick. “Good job out there, Cara,” he said. His face had softened a little from earlier. He looked less like an executioner today, more like the Pell she remembered.

“Really?” she asked. “Hard to see how that could have gone more wrong.”

Pell shrugged. “That naval idiot who got brained is going to make it, at least. Mild concussion, that’s all.” He pointed at a bench of couple of rows over. A woman in black Naval Security armor, her helmet removed, lay on her back. Two med-droids scanned her while she stared at the ceiling with glassy eyes. A goose egg was already rising on her forehead, but aside from that she seemed unharmed.

The sight didn’t cheer Cara up much. “Someone got killed over that concussion, Pell. You saw that, right? That void jockey fired into the crowd. On _kill_. He’s lucky they have those helmets. If I knew who it was, I’d strangle him myself.”

“I heard they were instructed to fire over people’s heads,” Pell replied. “Anyways, he was defending the Governor-General from a mob. They attacked us first.”

“Oh?” Cara said. “So I guess that makes it ok, then. Should we go round up people’s husbands and wives and shoot them?” Anger surged through her, but she was too tired to shout. “What happened to you, Pell? Why are you like this? You were never a murderer.”

Pell squatted down so their faces were level. “I’m not a murderer, Cara. I don’t want these people to suffer, and I’m not happy when they do. But this is a _war_. They’re not going to just stop attacking us because we ask nicely. We have to do things that we may find distasteful now to ensure peace in the future.”

“That’s imp thinking, Pell,” she said. All of her anger had drained away, leaving a sick sense of despair, like a bleeding wound in her soul. “Where does that end? Bombarding cities from orbit? Building our own Death Star?”

“No, Cara, no. We go as far as we have to and no further. The imps went as far as they could, because they could. That’s the difference between us.” He sighed and fished out a cigarra. If he’d stored this one behind his ear, Cara reflected, it would be soaked through. He patted his armor in frustration.

“God, no pockets on this thing. Anyways, I’m not a monster, Cara, whatever you may think. I like Pira. I think the Capridorians could have a pretty nice planet if they’d pull their heads out of their arses. But I’m a soldier, and that means I can’t afford to get squeamish.”

“I’m a soldier, too,” Cara reminded him. “When I signed up, I signed up to fight in a war. You keep calling this a war, but I don’t think it is. Those aren’t soldiers out there. They’re just people. If they throw a rock and we blow them away, that’s not a battle, it’s a massacre.”

“Shocktroopers!” Captain Fithiur’s voice got both of their attention. They turned to see him standing at the dais. An uncomfortable shiver of déjà vu ran up the back of Cara’s neck—that was just where Lord Tovelt had been standing on the day of the bomb attack. She picked herself up off the bench and trudged over to the stage.

“Capridor City is burning,” Fithiur said. He reached down and played with some of the toggles on the dais, and a holoprojection sprang to life between them. It showed the city from above. Fithiur adjusted the controls and the view panned down the promenade. At first, it was hard for Cara to make sense of what she was seeing. Vast, dark blurs flowed like sludge along the sidewalks and alleys, occasionally breaking apart and reforming. In their wake, hovercars lay overturned or engulfed in flame. Then she realized that the holoprojector’s resolution limit had been reached. Those were people, thousands and thousands of people, rampaging unchecked through downtown.

“Rioting has spread from the plaza to the mercantile district and verges on the university district as well,” Fithiur said. “The local constabulary are fighting back, but their numbers are limited. There appear to have been some desertions.” He cleared his throat, but said nothing further on that score.

“The Governor-General has requested our assistance in quelling the rioting. We are to move out in platoon strength and—”

“Are you kidding?” Trooper Kart burst out in disbelief. “We’ll be walking bullseyes out there! A Republic uniform is going to be like red meat to a rancor!”

“It’s us or Naval Security!” Fithiur snapped back. “And you know they’ll shoot to kill! Is that what we want?”

A murmur among the troops indicated that no, it wasn’t, though there were more dissenters than Cara would have liked to see. Pell and Trooper Juwanna didn’t seem to mind that idea at all. Fithiur pinched the bridge of his snout and closed his eyes.

“Deploy in squads. Nonlethal force only unless it’s kill or be killed. If I hear about a shocktrooper executing looters, I will descend on you like the wrath of Vader himself. Do I make myself clear?”

The troopers nodded. Fithiur toggled off the holoprojection, much to Cara’s relief. Looking at it had been making her feel sick.

“Ten minutes to rehydrate and resupply, then move out. We’ll coordinate over the comm-band, but I’m also uploading grid maps to your helmets’ HUDs. Use them. And starting tonight, you’re all confined to barracks unless you’re on active patrol. Move out!”

What followed was the most nightmarish evening of Cara Dune’s life. Smoke from the burning downtown billowed overhead. It blocked out the sun and filled the air with thick haze. She felt unbalanced, as though she were walking on some high-grav space station. Her squad moved from point to point, following the blinking dots in their HUD. Occasionally they would stop to defend a chokepoint or disperse a crowd. Rioters were everywhere, most of them carrying makeshift weapons: a chair leg or a broken tree branch. The beautiful flower beds had been torn up, the manicured trees mutilated and stripped down to bare wood. Their tender droids lay on their sides, sparking and moaning, or silent with their gutted circuitry hanging out.

Most of the rioters they saw gave them a wide berth. Some, drunk or so far gone that their fury had overwhelmed their reason, attacked instead. Cara met these charges shield-to-shield with her comrades. They swung their batons like reaper droids harvesting gain, scything down the unruly tide. Where the mob pressed thickest, the shocktroopers deployed their stunners in a firing line and left rioters moaning and twitching on the cobbles. Cara lost count of the angry faces, the expressions of hatred that curdled into pained dismay when she deployed her baton. They all began to blend into each other.

Sirens wailed overhead, drowning out even the crackle and roar of flames. Cara had heard that the constables were out assisting riot dispersal, but she didn’t see a single one all evening. She saw plenty of medics, carrying away fallen Capridorians or assisting them where they lay. Fire control droids deployed the manage the largest infernos, and occasionally her phalanx would surround one to defend it as it worked. Almost everyone she saw was covered in a gritty layer of dust and pulverized ferrocrete, and she _knew_ that her white-orange armor was stained a solid grey. Her shield had long since lost its translucence. She worked methodically, feeling like a droid herself, fighting back the grey waves of exhaustion that tugged at her eyelids.

By nightfall, the rioters had mostly dispersed, and the droids had managed to bring all of the large fires under control. Smaller blazes guttered in ruined shops and broken glass littered the street. Cara’s squad was one of the last to return to barracks. They stripped off their armor in silence. Every single one of them was covered in bruises and small, bloody cuts.

The butcher’s bill, when it came, was worse than Cara had imagined. Two hundred dead, more than half in the Kingsveld. Some had been shot by Naval Security, but more had been trampled or crushed to death by the rampaging mob. Nobody even knew how many wounded, but Capridor’s hospitals were overflowing. The economic damage was beyond calculation. No Republic troops had been killed, but the mood in the barracks was as low as Cara had ever seen it. The holovid anchor seemed on the verge of tears.

“Capridor City mourns today,” she said. Her eyes had been rimmed with kohl, her cheeks rouged. Cara wondered if that was some local funeral tradition. “A terrible tragedy. We pray that the fallen rest with the ancient kings tonight. Only the heroism of our local constabulary, supported by the brave forces of the New Republic, prevented—”

The holovid winked out. Cara flopped back onto her bed and stared at the ceiling. Her fury threatened to boil over: fury at the rioters, at the murderers in Naval Security, at the Sons of Capridor, at the blonde man she’d shocked, fury at the wretched universe that let such terrible things happen. Rising up beneath the fury, though, was fear, deep and primal. _Yannik_ , she thought, and cursed herself for thinking of him. _Is he ok?_ She hoped against hope that he’d been smart enough to stay away. _Get on your boat, Yannik_ , she willed. _Sail away from here. Across the ocean, maybe. Sail to safety._

But where was safe? Here she was, nestled in the barracks, in the heart of the Republic enclave on Capridor. She didn’t feel safe. Would she ever again?


	7. Tonight, the Garden

Dawn brought no comfort. Cara had tossed and turned for hours, finally slipping into fitful, haunted sleep. In her dreams, she’d been tiny, ducking between cobblestones the size of houses. Overhead, giants had roared and trampled and bludgeoned each other, oblivious to the tiny woman beneath their feet. “Help!” she’d yelled. “Help me!” She had to run and dodge to avoid being crushed. One of the giants toppled to the ground, and his blood flooded the crevices between the cobblestones. Cara ran from it, but the wave of red picked her up and swept her away. She woke up spitting and coughing.

Nobody joked in the barracks that morning. Even Pell sat quietly. Surprising nobody, Sergeant Reits mandated joint patrols. “ _Nobody_ leaves this barracks alone, do you understand?” he said. “That means you, Rutledge. That local girl you’ve been bragging about, she’s just going to have go without.”

Pell shrugged. “You’re the boss, Sarge.”

Cara and Pell took patrol together. As if sensing her dark mood, he was uncharacteristically silent. They strolled side by side, occasionally making light conversation but carefully avoiding any discussion of the night before. _Spare me your lectures on Doing What You Have to Do, Pell_ , Cara thought. _I did what I had to do last night. I hated it, but I did it._ He had been right there beside her, and he hadn’t taken any relish in riotbreaking either. He’d been methodical, that was all. Efficient. And when he was done, Cara had no doubt, he’d slept like a baby.

In the light of day, Capridor City looked even worse than Cara had imagined. The beautiful planters were gone, their contents splintered and ruined. Almost every shop window on the Promenade had been broken. Most had swept up the glass and boarded the holes, but a few looked abandoned. Every block, it seemed, at least one building was fire-damaged, soot stains clinging to the marble walls and sidewalks. There were almost no people out and about, and the few they did see turned and ran at the sight of them.

The Kingsveld had been cleaned, and that was somehow worse. Gone was the stage, except for a couple of broken pieces of wood lying beneath benches. Gone were the bodies. Some of the stones still bore odd stains and discolorations, and there were plenty of gaps where paving stones had been torn up, but the flowerboxes had been entirely removed. If Cara hadn’t seen them on her last trip, she’d have never known they were there. The Kings, of course, remained. They were eternal. They stared down at Cara and Pell, and if they had opinions on what they’d witnessed the previous day, they kept them to themselves. There were a few makeshift shrines scattered throughout the plaza, cairns of stones or clusters of votive candles. A couple of them were occupied when Cara and Pell arrived, Capridorians kneeling in silent prayer or contemplation. They watched the Republic troopers with blank expressions on their faces. They showed neither fear nor hate, just careful, patient attention.

Normally, Cara looked forward to the end of her shift. She’d gotten used to jogging through the maze of alleys, or walking down by the waterfront. Today, though, she found herself dreading it. She’d return directly to the barracks, and then… what? Watch holovids all evening? Bet on the fathiers with Pell? Try to read? The barracks already felt like a prison, and she wasn’t even locked up yet.

“Can you go on ahead?” she asked Pell. The sun was starting to descend, but they had a few hours before dark. “I’ll catch on up to you.”

“Reits doesn’t want us out alone,” Pell reminded her. “I actually think he’s got the right idea, at least for the next day or two. There’s bound to still be some unrest out there.”

“ _Please,_ Pell,” Cara begged. “I won’t be long. I just… have to check on something, ok? You can wait for me by Pell Alley and we’ll go back home together. Please do this for me.”

Pell looked her up and down. “Is this about—”

“It’s nothing bad,” Cara said quickly. She had the feeling Pell had been about to guess correctly. “But it’s personal.”

He thought for a moment, then his eyes narrowed. “Ok, but it’s Cara Alley from now on, ok?”

She smiled and threw her arms around him. “Thanks, Pell,” she said. He returned the hug at once.

“No sweat, Cara,” he said. He patted her back. “Don’t get caught, ok?”

“Don’t get caught, Pell.” Cara pulled back and held up her fist. He punched it, knuckle to knuckle, and turned to go.

As soon as he was out of sight, Cara made for the waterfront. Her heart raced in her chest. Thoughts she hadn’t allowed herself to think all day bubbled up in her brain. She saw Yannik lying on the street, bleeding, his stand shattered and burning. She willed herself not to run. If she ran, she knew, she might panic.

She reached the riverwalk and stopped short. She scanned the horizon end-to-end with a soldier’s practiced eye. Yannik’s stand was normally easy to spot because of its bright canopy. It was impossible to miss, and today, she didn’t see it.

_She didn’t see it_. The panic she’d fought down so ferociously began to surge back. Cara jogged over towards the fence, hoping that somehow she’d missed it, that she was in the wrong place. No—there was the stand, all right, its canopy collapsed, its struts folded in. It looked just like it had when they’d left for their tour. Had that only been a couple of days ago? It already felt like a lifetime.

She reached the stand, hoping against hope that she’d see him there, perhaps opening up his grill or preparing his stock. Maybe he’d just gotten a late start. No such luck—the personal shield hummed, but aside from that the stand was dark and silent.

Cara slumped against the fence. She felt suddenly hollow. All throughout yesterday’s nightmarish evening, she’d told herself that she was keeping the peace, fighting for Capridor’s future. All of a sudden that future seemed very hard to see.

“Cara?” A voice broke through her gloom. She looked around, saw nothing but seabirds and the barren riverwalk. The clouds overhead had thickened and congealed, leaving the river dull and grey.

“Cara!” This time, she caught a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye. She turned and her heart leapt in her chest. A familiar figure stood at the base of the nearest gangplank. He dropped the cable he was holding and waved up at her. “Hungry today?”

“Yannik!” Cara did not bother trying to keep the relief out of her voice. “By the Force, Yannik, you scared me! I saw your stand empty and I thought… I thought…”

She trailed off. There was no need to tell him what she’d thought; they both knew.

Yannik climbed the gangplank and stood just on the other side of the fence. He leaned heavily on it and smiled at her. That smile banished all of Cara’s panic, all of her nascent terror. She leaned back against his stand. Her legs felt suddenly boneless.

“No, I’m alive and well,” he said, sketching a quick salute. “I didn’t think there would be much business today, so I took the _Lady_ out. Got to stock up, you know. Besides, it’s supposed to rain something awful tomorrow, and who wants to be out fishing in that?”

“Makes sense,” Cara nodded. Her heart was still hammering in her chest, as though it hadn’t gotten the message. “Yannik, yesterday—”

He held up one hand to cut her off, his face suddenly solemn. “I know. I saw some of it on the holovid. It was awful.”

“I’m so sorry, Yannik,” Cara said. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like that.” She hadn’t come here intending to unburden herself, but the whole story began to spill out of her: Ixil’s death, the firefight in the building, the governor’s arrival and the terrible march to the Kingsveld. “It was that Naval trooper,” she said, her hands curling into fists. “Murderer. He set this all off.”

“No, Cara, no,” Yannik said, shaking his head. “I’m not defending him, but the fuse on this bomb was lit weeks ago. Things were always going to get worse before they got better. I’m an optimist, but even I know when to be realistic.”

“Yannik, some of them were kids,” Cara said. “People brought their kids. And they were shouting the loudest of all.”

“Kids follow their parents.” Yannik shrugged. “Look at me, shrimping like my old man. You can’t do anything about that. All you can control is yourself.”

“But I—”

“You didn’t kill anyone, right?”

Cara shook her head. “I don’t think so… those shock-batons hurt, but they’re not lethal unless you really go mad with one. And I didn’t. None of us did.”

“Then you shouldn’t feel guilty. You had to keep the peace, and you did. I’m sorry that it happened this way, but I don’t think it’s useful to point fingers. The important thing is how to ensure this kind of tragedy never happens again.”

“But how?” Cara had asked herself that question more than a dozen times over the past day. “Your people still hate us. Probably more than ever now. They’ll call it the Kingsveld Massacre or something.” She took a deep breath and fought to keep her composure. Closing her eyes helped. “I hate this, Yannik. I hate this. This assignment. This isn’t what I signed up for. This isn’t a war, whatever Pell says.”

Something touched her wrist, and she looked up to see Yannik’s hand laying gently on her arm. “I know, Cara,” he said. “I know you do. You’re a good woman. You have a good heart. That’s why Capridor needs you. If all the Republic troops here were like that Naval man, we could never have peace. If more of the Republic troops are like you, though, I think we have a chance. Capridor will come to love you in time. I’m just a shrimpman—if I can see that you care, then others can as well. They’ll come around.”

“Yannik…” Cara stood frozen. She was totally aware of the pressure of his hand against her. All of yesterday’s sorrow and anguish and rage spun in her gut, but mixed in with it now was a fragile sense of expectant hope. She was afraid to move in case she snuffed that hope out. “More Capridorians should be like _you_. You actually gave us a chance.”

Yannik withdrew his hand, and the gossamer moment between them popped like a soap bubble. “Well, your money spends,” he said with a grin. “Actually, I thought you might be coming by today, so I prepared you something.” He climbed over the fence and clicked his control rod, dropping the stand’s shield. Reaching under the counter, he withdrew a wicker basket, the same one he’d taken on their tour.

“Here you go,” he said. “They’re not as good cold, but I’m sure they beat barracks hall food. Share them around. It’s free advertising for me.”

“Thanks, Yannik,” Cara said, and smiled for the first time since the previous night. She could feel the tide of hopelessness retreating. Just talking to Yannik had that effect.

“Eat them tonight!” he said. “They do tend to go off.” He put the shield back up and looked up at the sky. “I have to go get my catch unloaded. I’ll… see you around, ok?” He looked suddenly nervous, as though there was something more he wanted to say but didn’t dare. Cara nodded.

“I’ll bring the basket back tomorrow.” She waved goodbye and turned to go.

“You’d better!” Yannik called, waving at her retreating back. “It’s my only one!”

Pell was waiting for her just where he’d said he would, leaning against a street sign and smoking. He saw him coming, took one last drag off his butt, and ground it under his heel. “What have you got there?” he asked, eyeing the basket. “Secret personal business? Vader’s helmet? The lost treasure of Count Dooku?”

“Dinner,” Cara replied. “But not for you, if you’re going to be snotty about it.”

“Alright, alright! Emperor’s bones!” Pell held up his hands in mock surrender. “Come on, let’s get going before Reits wonders why we’re so late.”

Their arrival in the barracks did not cause trouble, as Cara had feared it might. Reits sat at the duty desk, reading a newspaper with his feet up. He harrumphed at the sight of them. “Took the scenic route back, did you?” he growled.

“Just picking up my medicine,” Pell replied. Reits scowled at him.

“Your medicine?”

“Yeah. If I have to be cooped up in this bunker for 16 hours a day, I’ll kill myself. So really, I’m doing you a favor by getting some fresh air.”

Reits rolled his eyes and went back to his newspaper. “Don’t come crying to me when some insurgent blows your head off,” he groused.

Cara brought the basket to the mess and flipped it open. She had expected to see a couple of shrimp skewers, but Yannik had gone all-out. As if knowing that any gift he gave her would have to be shared, he’d packed the basket to the rim with food: shrimp, soft bread, even a little brick of cheese. No wine this time, but a little vac-sealed thermos of _mache_ , too. Cara took this herself. She had acquired a bit of a taste for spiciness.

A few at a time, troopers drifted over to investigate Cara and her basket. She doled out shrimp like a quartermaster and sliced the bread and cheese into pieces to go with it. A couple of the troops asked her where she’d gotten the food. “Oh, just this little place I know,” she said with a vague smile on her lips.

Even Reits and Fithiur wandered over. “Good find, Dune,” Reits said, biting into a shrimp. “You’ll have to show me this ‘little place’ of yours when things calm down.”

Fithiur said nothing. He’d bitten into one of the Volcanic Deluxe, and his eyes were bulging out of his head. Cara smirked and sipped her _mache_. Fithiur would just have to find some tea or something.

Little by little, the basket depleted. Mindful of what Yannik had said, Cara didn’t bother trying to save any for tomorrow. Trooper Juwanna took the last two and wolfed them down together. Her snout crinkled in appreciation. “They’re like Rodian snapclaws!” she proclaimed, and from the tone of her voice, that was a good thing.

Cara looked down into the basket and furrowed her brow. There was something still in there: a folded piece of paper, carefully placed at the bottom. It didn’t look like a receipt or a piece of trash. She looked up, but it appeared nobody else had noticed it; Juwanna was sucking the spice off her fingers, and Pell had long since wandered off to watch his beloved fathiers. She flipped the lid closed and stood up.

Her bunk was quiet at this time of evening, with the rest of the platoon trying to amuse themselves in the barracks’s poorly stocked rec room. She looked around carefully anyways, making sure nobody was hiding beneath their sheets or in the refresher. Only when she was sure she was alone did she palm the piece of paper and slide the basket under her bed. It was little, barely the size of her hand even unfolded. She turned it over, prepared to be disappointed.

It wasn’t a receipt. It wasn’t much of a letter, either. Six words were printed on the paper, in thick letters.

_Tonight, the Garden. By the gate._

Cara’s heart thudded in her chest. She lay back on her bed and clutched the paper to her chest. Her thoughts were racing, racing like Pell’s fathiers. The storm in her stomach was back and worse than ever. She closed her eyes, but that did not help her concentration. She saw Yannik’s face, smiling. As she watched, it morphed into Pell’s, then the old man from the square, then the screaming blonde child. _The Garden_. She could picture it now. The moon would sit low overhead, bright as an Old Republic cred-coin, and he’d have a bottle of wine. They’d sit by a gurgling fountain and he’d pour two glasses, and they’d toast to… to…

To what? To the future? Whose future? Theirs? Capridor’s? _Don’t tell me you’re even considering this_ , said a tiny voice in her head. _You don’t have a future here, you know that. Soon enough you’ll be redeployed halfway across the galaxy hunting some petty warlord or other._

_Maybe not_ , Cara told herself. _Maybe this is long-term. They’ll need peacekeepers for months yet, the way things are going. Maybe by the time this is all over, I’ll be ready to muster out._

_You really think so?_ The voice in her head laughed bitterly. _There’s no muster out, Cara, not for you. You’re a soldier. You know that. This is just a fantasy_.

_I don’t have to be. Not for the rest of my life. And I don’t want to be, not if it means what it meant last night._

_Oh yeah, Yannik will love that, won’t he?_ the voice sneered. _You beating up his countrymen and neighbors. Maybe you’ll shoot his cousin for treason. Won’t that be a fun dinner table conversation? Don’t fool yourself._

She groaned under her breath. _Stop thinking about what might go wrong. What do I even want? Do I want to go to the Gardens? Do I want Yannik?_ She imagined what it might be like: to hold him, to smell the brine on his clothes, to feel his lips against hers. To hear him say her name every day, to roll up his sleeves and see how far those tattoos went. Her heart fluttered, _pitter-pat._

_Are you going to become a fisherwoman too?_ the voice asked, its tone mocking. _Or a cook?_

_Maybe. If I want to._ _But he’d never ask me to._ She knew that, as surely as she’d ever known anything. _Whatever I wanted to do, he’d be proud. If he’s ok with a New Republic shocktrooper, he’d be ok with anything._

_Think of the risk, then._ The voice changed tones, wheedling now instead of scornful. _Sneaking out? With the barracks on lockdown? You’ll be lucky to dodge a charge. And for what? You’ve barely known the man a week!_

“I know, damn it!” Cara realized she’d spoken out loud and sat bolt upright. Fortunately, the bunk hall was still empty. She shuddered. The Garden sprawled in her imagination, moonlight shining off its fountains and ponds, its flowers swaying gently in the breeze.

By the time the other troopers started filing into the bunk hall, Cara was no closer to a decision. She lay on her back, staring at the ceiling. A few times she’d tried to fiddle with her datapad, to pull up some brainless holovid series or listen to music, but the distractions felt paper-thin. She kept glancing towards the door. More than once she thought about asking Pell for advice, but dismissed the idea immediately. If she told him and he disapproved, that would be taking the choice away from her—he’d be sure to alert Reits if she tried to slip out. And besides, it wasn’t his business. It was hers.

Even after lights out, Cara lay awake. Silence descended on the barracks, aside from the grunts of soldiers trying to get comfortable. She lay there listening to her heart. It had calmed down from earlier, and now beat steadily in her ears: _ka-thum, ka-thum, ka-thum_. _What do you want?_ she asked it. _What do I want? What should I do?_

She didn’t come to the decision all at once. Rather, it coalesced around her gradually, assembling itself one piece at a time. A soldier’s life was often short, Cara knew that. Even an assignment like Capridor wasn’t safe. She thought of poor Ixil, still lying on his slab in the morgue. Would she die on Capridor, killed by an insurgent sniper? Or would she die in the void to a pirate’s laser, or on some anonymous battlefield light-years away? Someday, she would die, and on that day she’d have a moment to regret all the chances she never took. She was being offered such a chance here, and she was going to take it. Now, before it slipped away forever.

She slid out of bed and padded across the floor. A couple of the troopers she passed mumbled in their sleep, but Cara was among the best in the squad at stealthy exfiltration. She’d gotten out of much tighter spaces than this, in much more hostile territory. She paused for a moment and buckled on her blaster belt. No sense going out totally unarmed. And if she was going to be in trouble anyways…

_In for a decicred, in for a chrome_ , she thought.

Leaving the barracks itself was only slightly harder. There were all sorts of security tripwires and code-locked doors. Most of them, however, were focused on keeping things out, not keeping things in. Cara’s ID badge deactivated all of the barriers, and it was the work of a moment to access the alarm panels and erase the trace of her passage. As long as she got back before morning, they’d never even know she was gone.

Reits had posted a sentry, but Trooper Juwanna’s night vision was only passable. Besides, she was lazy. Cara knew the Rodian would be snoozing by the security desk, counting on the motion sensors and automated scanners to alert her to any intrusion. Of course, Cara knew where all of those sensors were planted, and she knew all of their blind spots. She’d helped install them.

Soon she was walking in the cool night air, the squat dome of the barracks dwindling behind her. A little tickle of excitement ran up her spine. It felt like old times: dropped by shuttle onto some imp planet, no support, just her and her gun and her wits. She’d always come home safe then. Thinking about this as a mission made it easier for her to focus, too. All she had to do was concentrate on achieving her objective. She didn’t have to think about what she’d do when she got there. A few curfew patrols were out, but they were making no effort to be stealthy, and it was trivial to avoid them. The alleys that honeycombed the capital had a thousand places to hide.

Aside from the patrols, the streets were deserted. Cara hadn’t realized how used to the buzz and beep of the gardener droids she’d become until they were gone. The thought saddened her. Hopefully, Capridor could rebuild soon, and they’d replant the trees and flowers. The city didn’t feel the same without them. She deliberately avoided the Kingsveld, partially out of a desire to avoid notice, partially because the sight of it still made her feel ill. Instead, she looped around in a wide arc until the city started to climb into the foothills.

It was a beautiful night, at least. If storms really were on the horizon, Capridor had decided to give its capital city one last night of perfect weather. The clouds had parted overhead, enough to let the moonlight spill into the city’s streets and alleys. A faint smell of burning still hung in the air, but so did the fresh alpine scent of the forest. This part of the city had been mostly spared the rioting, and depending on where Cara looked, it was possible to pretend that everything was just as it had been a week before. _Before the riots. Before the bomb. Before this beautiful planet went to hell_.

Thinking about the past made it easier for her not to look ahead to the future. She was committed now, the doubting voice silenced, but she still wondered if she was making a mistake. _What will he say to me? What will I say to him?_ She didn’t know, even now. She knew nothing except that she wanted to be there, in the Garden, twining his fingers through hers, feeling the rest of the world fall away. There was only one thing on Capridor worth fighting for, and she’d found it. For him, she’d go forth every day, and let the glares and curses slide off her back like blaster fire off a capital ship. For him, she’d do this awful, wretched job. Yannik deserved a peaceful planet. And she deserved to share it with him.

Her heart raced as she approached the Garden. “By the gate,” his note had said. Well, here was the gate, and it hung open. Cara couldn’t see anyone around, but the Garden’s many trees and bushes offered a thousand places to hide. Should she go inside? Were they supposed to go inside together? She lingered on the threshold for a moment. Goosebumps prickled up her arm.

“Yannik?” she finally called, her voice quiet. She took a couple of steps inside the gate and looked around. “Yannik, are you there?” To her left, a bed of pink flowers reached up to her waist, swaying gently back and forth. To her right, a marble bench straddled a brook that flowed from a hidden spring to a tiny pond. The scene was perfect, pastoral, lit only by silvery moonlight. It was also empty. Cara swept the garden from left to right, letting her combat-trained senses take it all in: cover, lines of fire, potential hostiles. Nothing. The garden was empty. She supposed the curfew was keeping people away. But Yannik had asked her to meet him _tonight_. He’d presumably made plans. Had he been waylaid?

_Maybe he just isn’t here yet._ The note had just said “tonight.” Was she really expecting him to be waiting for her? In the holovids, characters would turn on a newsfeed just in time for the reporters to be talking about some plot-relevant story, but that wasn’t how the galaxy worked. He might still be making his way here. If so, that was fine. Cara could wait. She took a seat on a bench and listened to the babble of the brook.

She wasn’t sure how long she sat and waited. Boredom was part of a dropper’s life, too. She’d spent plenty of uncomfortable hours in sniper nests or dugout bunkers. There, she’d always been focused by the anticipation of violence. Here, the anticipation was a softer thing, but it cut her to her core. She could not stop thinking about Yannik, about his smile, about the way he’d called her _milady_ and touched her hand. She still wasn’t sure what she wanted to say to him. Maybe nothing. Maybe they didn’t even need words. As the minutes stretched into hours, though, her giddy anticipation began to evaporate, and darker thoughts crawled out to play.

_He didn’t come, idiot._ The voice in her head was all too familiar, its tone full of relish. _What, did you really believe he was going to meet you here? Too many holovids, girl. Life isn’t a melodrama._

_Why wouldn’t he?_ Cara kneaded her forehead, trying to think of an explanation that would shut the mocking voice up. _He’s the one who invited me._

Maybe he had gotten arrested. Curfew was strict now, and he didn’t have Cara’s stealth training. That had to be it. Relief welled up inside her, mixed with frustration. She cursed inwardly. _What a fool! Thinks he’s making a romantic gesture, winds up in jail. And if I go to bail him out, Reits will notice._ She squeezed one gloved hand into a fist. _Yannik, you idiot, look what you made me do. Now_ I’m _in trouble, too._ She had to get back to barracks now, before she was noticed and missed. With luck, she could slip inside, and—

_BOOM_. The distant thump of an explosion broke her reverie. She looked up, confused, in time to feel a sudden hot gust blow over her face and riffle her hair. Cara had set off enough explosions on missions to know the difference between a big one far away and a small one close up. This one had been large, maybe even building-sized. She turned towards the city and her jaw dropped.

A dim orange glow lit the horizon, a false dawn. It was impossible to tell exactly where it was from her current vantage point, but it was right in the heart of downtown. There were plenty of targets there, but Cara was only thinking of one. _The barracks!_

She cast one lingering look behind her and set off at a jog. By the time the first siren split the air, she was sprinting.


	8. Capridor Endures

The streets were much more alive on her way back than they had been on the way out, and Cara had several close scrapes with curfew patrols. From time to time, she’d hear running footsteps, and duck into an alley or the shadow of an archway to wait them out. She could hear the crackle of distant flames, too. A plume of black smoke spread out over downtown like a foul mushroom. The closer she got, the more sure she was. _The barracks. Someone hit the barracks._ Fire control droids streamed past her from all directions, all converging on one spot.

Cara slowed as she approached her destination. She slipped into an alley that she knew let out near the barracks gate. If there had been an attack, any sentries would be on high alert. She waited near the alley mouth until she heard the distinctive rumble of a fire control droid. The droid, two stories tall and as wide as two hovercars side by side, trundled through the streets on thick treads. She waited until it passed her hideout, then ducked into its shadow and ran across the square.

The sight of the barracks pulled her up short. She stared, mouth agape, cover forgotten. Then front half of the building had completely collapsed. Farther back, it looked mostly intact, but large chunks of the roof had fallen in. The durasteel fence that ringed the compound had been blown outward by the force of the blast. Twisted spars of metal lay scattered halfway across the square. The buildings on either side of the barracks were on fire, their walls partially collapsed.

People swarmed all over the rubble, like insects panicking around a dug-up hive. Some of them were rescue droids, but Cara could see a few troopers in orange-and-white armor. She joined them without hesitation. None of them gave her a second look or stopped to question where she’d come from—they accepted her help in grateful silence. The heat of the flames raised sweat from her arms and forehead, and she had to keep wiping her hair out of her eyes. Soon she was as covered with stone dust as the rest of them, her hands scraped and cut from lifting jagged fragments of ferrocrete.

The rubble was full of bodies, some still, others moaning and twitching. Cara worked methodically by firelight, shifting rubble, dragging out bleeding troopers and carrying them to the flat square. The medics set up a triage tent and worked furiously, spraying synthskin and injecting blood substitute and painkillers. Too often, they would merely look at a grievously wounded trooper and shake their heads before moving on to the next one.

Cara stooped to lift a heavy durasteel support beam. She gritted her teeth and pushed as hard as she could with her legs, but it wouldn’t shift. Trooper Juwanna was unconscious beneath it, but she appeared to be breathing. Her leg had been crushed and was leaking an alarming amount of green Rodian blood. Cara closed her eyes and drew on her last reserves of strength, and to her surprise the beam started to rise. She looked around to see Pell next to her. He was covered in dirt and blood, half-dressed in his uniform, but he met her eyes and nodded in silent recognition. Between the two of them, they shifted the beam enough for a third trooper to pull Juwanna clear. Only when she had been laid down on a white sheet by the triage tent did Cara rest. She bent double, hands on her thighs and tried to catch her breath.

“How many made it out?” she asked. Pell shook his head. He looked more exhausted than she was.

“Not enough. You, me, Reits. I saw Fithiur getting his head bandaged. A dozen others. Kart bought it, and Undine, and Lylakh. Who knows how many people are still under there?”

“I can’t believe it.” Cara shook her head. “I just can’t believe it. Was it another detonator? An inside job?”

Pell shook his head. “Hard to tell from here, but to me it looks like someone filled a speeder with hi-ex and rammed it into the front gate.” He wiped one hand across his forehead, smearing the grime around. “This is an escalation. We have to answer this. We _have_ to. Otherwise—”

Their commlinks burst into life, startling both of them into silence. Cara scrambled to lift hers to her ear.

“—immediate assistance! I repeat, we need immediate assistance! We have a situation at the Kingsveld! All available units, dispatch at once!”

“Emperor’s bones, how much worse can this night get?” Cara asked. “What do we do? Stay or go?”

Pell had evidently retrieved his gun before leaving the barracks. He lifted it and clicked the selector dial over to _kill_.

“We go. The droids are better at this rescue work than we are.”

“What, just the two of us?”

Pell looked around the square. “You want to pull a squad together?”

In the end, they found two other troopers on their feet and alert enough to move out: Ekweh, who was limping a little but otherwise fit, and a female Twi’lek named Yrra. One of her head-tails had been partially severed, the tip cauterized an angry red. She seemed dazed but alert.

“Don’t you need to get that looked at?” Cara asked, pointing to the damaged _lekku_. Yrra shook her head.

“Later. It’ll keep.” She bared her fangs. “Killing something might take my mind off it.”

The four of them checked the charge on their blasters and shared ammunition around. There was no thought of nonlethal force now, no consideration of stunners and riot batons. They were shocktroopers, not constables. “We might be heading right into a trap,” Pell observed as they moved out.

“I know,” Cara said. “But we have to respond anyways. The Sons are going to try to strike again while we’re occupied. Do you know if they hit the Oldtown barracks, too?”

“I only heard the one explosion,” Yrra volunteered.

“Yeah, but they hit us while we were asleep,” Ekweh pointed out. “Could be they set the Oldtown bomb first and we slept right through it.”

Cara had only heard one explosion, too, but she wasn’t about to volunteer that information. She’d nearly forgotten about her missed rendezvous until now. Thinking about it trickled an icy little finger of doubt into her stomach. _I wasn’t at the barracks,_ she thought in dismay. She tried to cut the thought off, but it unfurled despite her protestations. _I was at the Garden. Because Yannik invited me. Did he…?_

She would not think the rest. She would not. Instead, she focused on the mission. Her makeshift squad advanced in a loose spread, each of them unconsciously falling back on their training. Their eyes flitted from the yawning alley mouths to the few remaining trees lining the street—all potential pieces of cover, all potentially hiding hostiles. The wail of the sirens receded into the distance. Up ahead, the statues of the Force-Guided Kings loomed overhead. Clouds had rolled in, or perhaps it was just the spreading plume of smoke from the burning barracks; either way, the moonlight from earlier had vanished, leaving only the sterile white light of the streetlamps. They cast too many shadows, and the harshness of their light gave everything a sinister and sharp-edged aspect.

Cara could see people milling around in the square. They looked like civilians, and they didn’t look armed, but she raised her gun anyways. As far as she was concerned, every Capridorian was a potential hostile until proven otherwise. Pell took point, advancing into the Kingsveld with his gun held high. This close, Cara could hear sounds echoing across the square. Someone was weeping, heavy mournful sobs that rolled across her like the tide. Other people were shouting or babbling excitedly, but the weeper captured her attention. _What the hell is going on?_

“Cara, stop,” Pell called back. There was a note of warning in his voice. “Don’t come in here.”

“Pell?” She stopped short and squinted. There was something on the statue across the square, some dark shape. It was too dim for her to make it out. “Pell, what’s happening?” She took the last few steps into the square, and her eyes adjusted to the dimness. She looked around, at first unable to make sense of what her eyes were telling her. There were dark shapes on all of the statues, and at first she thought they’d been discolored by paint or fire damage. Then she realized what she was seeing.

Someone had tied a thick cable around the neck of the King across the square. She didn’t know any of their names, but this was the King who carried a set of scales. The cable dangled down to his neck and terminated in a noose. A body hung from the noose: a man, middle-aged, wearing what looked like a sleeping gown. Recognition took a moment, but Cara staggered back when she realized it was Lord Rictor Tovelt. Blood dripped out of his mouth and down his front. His eyes bulged, staring at nothing. A plastic placard dangled from a string around his neck and rested on his stomach. _Collaborator_ , it red, in blood-red letters _._

She turned. The next statue, the King with the plowshare, had been similarly adorned. This body was a woman, older, her grey hair set in tight rollers. A couple of them had fallen out, leaving wispy grey stands to blow in the breeze. Her feet were bare, and her toes stuck out of the bottom of her gown. She was swaying gently back and forth. The placard around her neck read _Servant of the Enemy._

Cara’s head spun. The blaster fell out of nerveless fingers. She didn’t even notice it clatter across the cobbles. Her stomach churned. She’d thought she’d seen the worst the Capridorians could offer, had thought she was numb. She’d been wrong. Horror warred with revulsion in her head, so strong it made her dizzy. She looked away, unwilling to meet the old woman’s lifeless eyes, but every one of the statues bore a body. Their placards named their crimes:

_Rented to Rebs_

_Aided the Occupation_

_Betrayed Capridor_

The next one was Pira. Her face was frozen in a grimace of terror and anguish. Blood streamed down her arms, as though she’d tried to fight off her assailants. By the look of it, she had been stabbed in the stomach before being strung up. _Slut_ , announced the square of plastic around her neck.

_No, no, no_ , thought Cara, _no, this is a nightmare. I am going to wake up soon. I’ll be in my bed._ She willed herself awake, but nothing happened. Nightmares didn’t end until they had run their course. You had to let them play out. She turned, knowing before she did what she would see.

Yannik hung from the neck of a King carrying a huge stone timberman’s axe. He was dressed formally, much more formally than she’d ever seen him, in a tailed coat and pleated trousers. One of his shoes was missing, but the other looked like fine leather. His tall, brimmed cap was missing, revealing hair that had been scrupulously combed and creamed into place. His throat had been cut, and a tremendous wash of blood discolored the front of his jacket. _Reb-lover_ , read his placard.

He stared down at her with accusing eyes. _You did this_ , those eyes told her. _You killed me. Someone saw us, that’s all it took. They came for me while I was waiting for you. Why couldn’t you have stayed away from my stand? Why couldn’t you have stayed off our planet?_

Cara tore her eyes away from him and tried desperately to find someplace else to look. As she did, one last horrible detail clicked into place. Two of the kings carried a banner between them, strung up from shoulder to shoulder. _Capridor Endures_.

Pell’s voice echoed in her ear, but it was distorted, as though coming through a staticy commlink. She couldn’t make out any words. Cara fell to her knees. Her vision blurred. She let out a choked sob and pounded the cobblestones with both hands, heedless of the pain in her knuckles. A cry of anguish clawed its way up out of her throat, wordless and primal. She felt it stream out of her, carrying with it her future. Images burned and crisped in her mind: her and Yannik in the Garden, standing on the deck of a shrimp boat, laughing as the wind played with their hair. Fire scorched the edges of these images, consuming them, leaving only ash.

“Cara?” Pell spoke again, this time with a gentleness she hadn’t heard from him in ages. “Cara, we need to get these people down. We can’t leave them up there. It’s not right.” He wrapped an arm around her shoulder and helped her to her feet.

She was only dimly aware of the next hour or so. Her body was functioning on autopilot while her brain was light-years away. Reinforcements arrived from the Oldtown barracks within minutes. They cleared the square and set up a grav-scaffold. Cara waited on the ground, not trusting herself to climb. One by one, the Oldtown troops cut down the victims, removed the placards, tore down the hateful banner. Medics arrived next and covered the bodies with sheets. Cara kept wanting to go over to Yannik, to kneel by his side, to say goodbye. She couldn’t make herself move. She sat on a bench, her feet rooted to the ground, and stared at nothing. In her head, those two words played back over and over and over.

_Capridor endures. Capridor endures. Capridor endures._

Eventually, Pell sat down next to her. “Cara,” he began, and she turned to face him. Something about her expression silenced him. She could see him groping for words. “Cara, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what was going on with you and that tour guide, but I know that… that he meant something to you, and…” he swallowed. “Sithspit, I don’t know. They killed Pira. Those animals. Those _animals_.” He growled in his throat. “They’ll pay.”

He stood up abruptly and saluted. Cara looked up to see Captain Fithiur standing in front of her. She knew she should salute, too, but she couldn’t make herself move. She felt like leaden weights were attached to her hands.

Fithiur didn’t seem to notice. The bandage around his head was slightly bloodstained, and his eyes wouldn’t focus. He took in the scene in front of him, his mouth opening and shutting. “This is…” he began, and trailed off. It was as though he lacked the words to describe the enormity of what he was seeing.

“Monstrous,” he finally whispered. “A monstrous crime.”

“Sir,” Pell said, speaking low and urgently, quietly enough that only Fithiur and Cara could hear him. “Sir, with respect, I think you should reconsider my earlier suggestion. The Sons of Capridor have demonstrated shocking cruelty. Who knows what else they’re capable of? Someone in this city knows them, sir, knows where they’re hiding. We have to act.”

“To take hostages?” Fithiur turned to him. He looked dreadfully lost. A streetlight beam cast his features into sharp relief.

Pell nodded. “Fifty, sir, to begin with. Adult men only. Announce publicly that anyone who has information about the Sons of Capridor has one day to come forward.”

“And if nobody does?” Fithiur’s voice was barely a whisper.

“Firing squad.” Pell set his mouth in a tight little line. “In public. Hell, in the Kingsveld. Make people watch it happen.”

For a moment, Cara was sure Fithiur was going to refuse again. Part of her hoped he would. Part of her wanted nothing more than to be a member of that firing squad, to squeeze the trigger again and again and again until there were no Capridorians left.

Fithiur stared at the ground. Finally, almost imperceptibly, he nodded.

“Make it happen.”

Cara looked up at Pell, groping for words. She wanted to hate him for this, to scream at him. She wanted to remind him of the bloody crimes of the Empire. All her arguments died on her lips. When she opened her mouth, she saw Yannik, hanging bloody from the neck of the stone King. _He was coming_ , she thought. _He dressed his best because he was coming to the Garden._

All at once she was so very, very tired. She swayed on the bench. Somewhere a million parsecs away, someone was calling her name, but the darkness rose up before she could respond, and then everything was stillness and silence.

She awoke in a hospital bed. That much she could tell at once. The sheets that covered her were white and starched, crisper than her own barracks blanket. Somewhere to her right, she heard machine noise: rhythmic rattling and gusting, and a steady beep. It took a moment for the pain to catch up with her, but when it did, it came with a vengeance. Her entire body was sore, but her arms especially felt as though they’d been crushed by a mudhorn.

She processed the pain, sorting the aches by location and severity. Pain was an old friend. A shocktrooper quickly learned to operate through the pain, or she didn’t remain a shocktrooper for long. But after the pain came anguish. Memories oozed out, like radiation leaking from a cracked reactor core. Cara rolled over onto her side and curled up. She sobbed silently, pressing her face into the sheets, her mouth open in a silent scream. Grief squeezed the breath from her lungs and the thoughts from her mind. For a while, she lay there, unable to move.

But grief passed. The drowning tide receded. Cara gave it another ten minutes to ensure that she had complete control of herself and sat up. She was still dressed in her uniform from last night, which meant the bed was now filthy with soot and ferrocrete dust. She took a deep breath that quavered only a little bit and stood.

She was in a shared hospital room. A privacy curtain divided her bed from the next one over. The beeping and rattling she’d heard came from the other side of the curtain. Peeking under it, she could see the heavy feet of a 2-1B medical droid. She wondered who the patient was, and decided not to look. Whoever it was deserved their privacy.

Instead she walked out into the hall. The hospital was mostly empty, without the usual bustle of orderlies and nurses. Her boots echoed as she walked down the corridor. At the far end, it opened out into a large central space, mostly filled by a ring of desks. A half-dozen sentients in orange and white New Republic uniforms bustled around, hunched over consoles or carrying datapads. One of them, a stout Zabrak female, looked up as Cara approached.

“Young woman!” she blustered. “You have to go back to bed at once! You shouldn’t be about!”

“Where’s my platoon?” Cara asked. Her voice sounded hoarse to her own ears.

“You aren’t cleared to return to duty! You haven’t been discharged!”

“I’m discharging myself.” Cara walked past the desk, ignoring the Zabrak woman’s outraged shouts. Up ahead, a bank of turbolifts sat waiting for her. She summoned one and punched the ground floor button.

The hospital lobby was likewise full of people in New Republic uniforms—hurrying doctors, soldiers carrying boxes of supplies, and quite a few armed guards. Cara scanned the room for a friendly face. There! Trooper Ekweh sat on a bench by the entrance, sipping caf from a paper cup. Cara crossed the lobby and sat down next to him.

“Oh! Cara! Sorry, didn’t see you.” Ekweh pushed over to make room. “You want caf? It’s bantha fodder, but it’s better than nothing.”

Right now, the idea of eating or drinking anything turned Cara’s stomach, but she didn’t say so. Instead, she swept her arm to take in the lobby.

“What’s all this? What’s going on?”

“We’ve requisitioned this block,” Ekweh said. “While the barracks is repaired. The city’s on total lockdown. _Ekidna_ deployed practically her whole contingent, and there’s apparently a cruiser arriving this afternoon with regiment-scale backup. Capridor is under martial law now.”

“Where is everyone?” Cara asked. “Pell, the Captain, Major Wykk?”

“Wykk didn’t make it.” Ekweh looked somber. “The rest of them are at the constabulary next door. That’s our temporary base. There’s plenty of room, since more than half the platoon’s in hospital.” He looked down into his caf. “Or the morgue.”

“How bad is it?” Cara asked, dreading the answer.

“Thirty-three dead. A hundred and ten wounded, not counting you and me. They only put you here overnight for observation, and I pulled a damn muscle in my hip. Nothing serious.”

Cara only had one more question, but it was one she really, really didn’t want to ask. She steeled herself.

“Did we really take hostages?”

Ekweh nodded, looking glum. “Fifty of them. Pell led the roundup. Not much resistance—I think people were stunned, especially when we knocked on their door before dawn. They’re in the cells at the constabulary.” He sighed. “It doesn’t feel right. But what choice do we have?”

Cara stood, grimacing at the twinge in her back and legs. “Thanks, Ekweh,” she said. “Enjoy the caf.”

Ekweh gave her another mournful nod and slumped back against the wall. Cara turned and pushed her way through the crowd to the front doors.

The day had dawned dark and gloomy, with heavy cloud cover overhead. Fitful spurts of rain spattered against Cara’s head and shoulders. The constabulary wasn’t hard to find—it was kitty-corner with the hospital, its façade emblazoned with a set of golden scales. For justice, Cara supposed, but they just reminded her of the scales in the stone King’s hand. She shuddered and climbed the slate-grey steps.

Inside, Trooper Wilfors sat at the duty officer’s desk. He looked up at Cara as she entered and saluted. “Cara!” he said. “Glad to see you with us! How was the hospital food?”

Cara was in no mood for small talk. “Where’s Pell?” she asked. Something in her tone must have demonstrated how serious she was; Wilfors shrank back from her gaze and pointed into the station. “On guard in the lockup. Follow the signs.”

She did, striding past offices and bunkrooms. The Republic appeared to have turfed out the locals entirely—all she saw were New Republic uniforms. Cara approved. She wasn’t going to sleep in the same building as a Capridorian anytime soon. Up ahead, a heavy durasteel set of double-doors blocked the passage. Two sentries stood on duty outside of it, both troopers she didn’t recognize—she supposed they were from the Oldtown contingent. They eyed her as she marched up.

“Am I allowed in?” she asked. “Trooper Dune, serial number 82114 Aurek Leth.”

The sentries looked at each other, and one nodded. “My condolences, Dune,” he said, and for a moment her breath caught in her throat. Who else knew about Yannik? But the other trooper shook his head.

“Heard you lost a lot of good people last night. Don’t worry, we’ll teach these murdering skugs a lesson they won’t soon forget.”

Cara nodded. “Thank you,” she said, keeping her tone carefully level. The doors hissed open and she stepped through.

The lockup was larger than she’d anticipated. Two big communal cells lined one wall, and a corridor stretched away, presumably with more cells on either side. That was a good thing, too, because right now it was full to capacity. Each of the large cells could have comfortably fit ten men; they each had twice that now, and the noises she could hear from the corridor indicated that those cells were probably overfull as well. No fewer than fifteen shocktroopers, all armed and in full uniform, stood on guard or sat around low tables. Every head turned towards Cara as she stepped into the room. Pell, who had been sitting at the control console, rose to his feet.

“Cara!” he said, smiling. “Good to see you! How are—”

Cara ignored him. She’d intended to say hello, maybe to ask him a few questions, but something else caught her attention. Standing in the nearest cell, right up against the bars, was a familiar face. She’d only met him once, but he was unmistakable: that huge beard, those hulking shoulders. It was Jeroboam, the man from the bar. His nose had been broken, and twin trails of dried blood crusted his upper lip, but it was him all right. Cara crossed the room in three quick strides.

Before he could figure out what was happening, Cara reached into the cell with both hands and grabbed him by his lapels. Fury gave her strength and let her ignore the throbbing pain in her arms. “You!” she howled, and tugged with all her strength. He toppled forward and slammed face-first into the bars. He cried out as his injured nose mashed against the durasteel. Another bar dug into his cheek. Cara didn’t care. She’d throttle him here and now.

“Murderer!” She fought to keep the tears from coming. If she started crying now, she’d lose all control. “Murderer! I should have killed you in the bar!”

“Cara!” Pell’s voice was in her ear, and strong arms grabbed her around the shoulders. “Cara, enough!” She thrashed and bucked, but there were too many of them. It took three troopers plus Pell to drag her off Jeroboam. When she let go, he slumped backwards, breathing hard. Fresh blood trickled from his nose.

“Cara, no!” The troopers pushed her down into a chair and held her there until Pell waved a hand. He squatted down in front of her. “He had nothing to do with it, Cara. It wasn’t him.”

“How do you know?” Cara asked dully. Her sudden frenzy had passed, leaving her feeling hollow.

“My niece.” Jeroboam rumbled from inside the cell. His voice was thick and glottal, only partially because of his broken nose. “They killed my niece. My beautiful Pira.” He sat down on the ferrocrete floor. The other prisoners gave him a wide berth. He stared through the bars, his eyes focusing on nothing.

Cara exhaled. It took a couple of deep breaths before she trusted herself to speak again. “Why do you care what I do?” she asked, finally. She looked up at Pell. “You just want to execute him anyways.”

Pell shook his head. “No, I don’t. It is my sincere hope that we will set all of these miserable bastards free. But we can’t keep letting the Sons of Capridor kill people.”

“You think someone will give them up?” Cara asked. “Even the constables aren’t on our side.”

“I think someone had better,” Pell said. “Otherwise we’ll take more hostages. Again and again until they get it. Governor Kerskyan has formally approved the policy.” He didn’t sound proud; if anything, he sounded more weary than Cara. “I don’t like this, Cara, like I said. But I won’t flinch from my duty. I took an oath.”

With no orders from above, Cara was at loose ends all afternoon. She drifted through the constabulary, talking with those members of her platoon who had survived, watching holovid news of the barracks reconstruction. This was followed by a direct plea from the news anchor for information.

“Please,” she said, “if someone, anyone, has any information about these Sons of Capridor, please come forward. The New Republic forces have already indicated that future acts of terrorism will be responded to with hostage-taking. For the good of our planet… for the good of our brothers and sisters facing execution… please, share any information you have.”

Perhaps her plea touched someone. Perhaps one of the hostages had a wife or father or son who knew something. Cara never found out. But just as the sun was setting, Pell ran into the office where she was trying to read. “We got them!” he said. He grinned, and for just a second, Cara caught a glimpse of the old Pell again, the daredevil who’d been her best friend. “We got the Sons!”

Cara leapt to her feet. “What? How?”

“Tipster told us about their safehouse. Naval Security raided a meeting in progress. We got them dead to rights, Cara. Guns, bombs, modified commlinks. It’s them, all right. They found the warehouse where they did the… the killings.”

“And the hostages?”

“Being released as we speak. As soon as they’re gone, we’re bringing in the Sons.” His smile vanished, and he looked suddenly stern. “Cara, you can’t just go in there and kill them. I mean it. I want to do it too, trust me. You’d have to get in line. But this has to be proper, military style. Not murder.”

“No trial, though?” Cara asked. “How proper is that?”

“It’s a better deal than they gave Pira.” Just like that, Pell had hardened again. “We’ll look them in the eyes when we do it. And a firing squad is quick.”

“I want to see them,” Cara said. “I won’t attack them, don’t worry. I just need to see.”

“Well… ok,” Pell said, sounding uncertain. “Everyone will see them tomorrow. The execution’s at dawn, in the Kingsveld. Mandatory attendance. People have to see what happens to terrorist murderers.”

Cara stood on the rooftop landing platform, watching the last of the hostages stream out of the station. A crowd had gathered to meet them. A thin woman in a green dress burst out of the crowd and wrapped her arms around Jeroboam. She laid her head against his barrel chest and began to sob. In sorrow or relief, Cara couldn’t have said. The big man wrapped his arms around her and started crying as well.

Once they were all gone, an armored hovertransport buzzed into the square. It floated onto the landing platform and settled on ten strutlike feet. Steam vented from its hydraulics and the deployment ramps descended. And then down those ramps, emerging from the clouds of steam, came the Sons of Capridor.

The first thing that struck Cara was how _young_ they were. The oldest Son was no older than her. They wore torn clothing, and their faces were covered in grit and bruises. Some of them bled from the lip or forehead. Cara had no doubt that the arresting troopers had been rougher than necessary, but she could not bring herself to feel sympathy.

Some of the Sons looked dazed. Some hung their heads in shame. Others were stiff-necked, staring ahead, their posture proud and defiant. They had all been shackled at wrist and ankle, and they shuffled forward with difficulty. Faceless troopers in riot gear flanked the line on either side. Cara felt nothing as she watched them file past. She’d thought she might get some sense of satisfaction from this, but the hollow pit in her gut remained. Even imagining them face down, smoking from blaster burns, did nothing for her.

One of the Sons stumbled, and Cara stared at him. A jolt ran up her spine. She _recognized_ this one. With his blonde hair covered in dirt, bleeding from a cut on his forehead, it was hard to connect the youth in front of her to the one she’d seen playing outside the city. Without his billowing cloak, he no longer looked like Darth Vader. He looked like what he was: a boy, a sullen boy, who’d played a grown-up game. He retained his footing and stopped for a moment, long enough for one of the guards to prod him in the small of his back. The boy—Jayden, she remembered—stood up straight again and walked forward. He stared straight ahead, neither smiling nor frowning. His eyes met Cara’s for a moment, but there was no flicker of recognition there. Then he reached the turbolift and vanished from sight.

“Dirty business,” Pell was saying, shaking his head. “Some of them are barely more than kids. You notice, it’s always the old men talking about how bold action is needed, and it’s the young ones who actually take the bold action? Well, they’re paying for it now.”

Cara said nothing. Her stomach turned over. She looked away.


	9. Terrible Sweet Thunder

Nobody wanted to be on the firing squad. That much was obvious. And equally obvious was the reality that _someone_ would have to do it. It was important that the people of Capridor see justice done. “It can’t be droids, either,” Captain Fithiur said. With his bandage off, he no longer looked as dazed, but he hadn’t recanted the orders from last night either. “We can’t have machines do the killing for us. That would make it too easy. We owe it to these people to look them in the eye.”

So they’d resorted to the oldest choosing mechanism of all, one that predated the Old Republic. They’d torn a piece of paper into squares and inked black dots on five of them. Fithiur put them all in a helmet and shook them up. “Everyone takes one, _then_ you look,” he insisted. “No trading. No complaining. Anyone who can hold a blaster is eligible.” They did the drawing in the hospital, then, so Troopers Yrra and Juwanna could join them. Both women were fresh from bacta soaks and wrapped in hospital gowns, but neither complained. They reached into the helmet the same as everyone else.

The first black dot went to Trooper Ekweh. He sighed and deflated like a gut-shot victim, but said nothing. The second went to Wilfors. He crumpled the paper up into a ball and threw it angrily at the ground, as though he could dispose of his unwanted duty that easily.

The third went to Cara. She stared at the paper in her hand. The inkblot stared back at her like a baleful eye, unblinking, unfeeling. It wasn’t a perfect circle, she noticed; its edges were ragged and uneven. _Like a blaster wound._ She took a deep breath and held it.

Next to her, Pell unfolded his own paper. Pure white. He exhaled in relief and shook his head. “It should have been me, Cara,” he said. “It was my idea. I should have to see it through.” He held out his paper. “Here, we can switch quickly, before anyone notices.”

Cara shook her head and clenched the paper in her fist. “No. No trading, Fithiur said. I reached into the hat same as you. It’s fair.”

“Cara…” Pell put a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off.

“No. I’ll do it. It’s fine. Tomorrow at dawn, right?”

Pell nodded.

“Plenty of time to prepare.” She got up. The selection had finished—Cara hadn’t seen who drew the last two dots, but she supposed it didn’t matter.

“Where are you going?” Pell asked. Cara looked down at him.

“The station.”

“Cara, I don’t think that’s—”

She ignored him. Pell, at least, had the good sense not to try to follow her. Cara stalked down the hall, through the door, down the stairs. She couldn’t take a turbolift now. She couldn’t stand still. She crossed the square to the constabulary building, ignoring the rain that pelted down from overhead. The sun was starting to set, setting the horizon on fire. The sight of it reminded Cara of the burning barracks, as seen from the Garden. She lowered her gaze and kept walking.

There were fifteen Sons of Capridor in all. Half of them had been put in the big communal cells, but a quick glance told her the one she was looking for wasn’t in there. The guards eyed her nervously, but she held up her hands to show they were empty. “I’m not here to pick any fights,” she said. “I just want to talk to one of them.”

“Talk to them?” The nearest trooper, a human woman she didn’t recognize from the Oldtown barracks, made a face. “What about?”

“I’m on firing squad duty tomorrow,” Cara said, and the woman flinched backwards. “I think I’ve earned the right to a conversation.”

“Be my guest,” the woman said. “Don’t know why you’d want to get to know them, if you’re about to execute them.”

Jayden’s cell was about halfway down the hall. He was alone in there, sitting on a steel bench. Other Sons lay on the floor of their cells, or wept quietly. He just stared straight ahead.

“Jayden,” she said. He stood up at the sound of his name and looked her up and down. This close, she could see how young he really was. A hint of peach fuzz covered his cheeks and chin, the downy beginnings of a beard. He’d tried to grow a wispy moustache, too, but the blonde hairs were nearly invisible against his lip, except where the blood had matted into them.

“Reb,” he said. He squinted. “Hey, don’t I know you?” He stared at her a moment. She could see the gears turning in his head.

“Yeah!” he said. “That day, in the woods! You saw—” he cut himself off, as if suddenly realizing what he was about to say. His cheeks flushed. He looked, of all things, _embarrassed_.

_Don’t want your comrades to know you were playing baby games, huh?_ Cara thought. She considered saying something and dismissed the idea. She hadn’t come here to humiliate him.

“What do you want?” Jayden asked. “Come here to gloat?”

Cara shook her head.

“Then why?” He paced his cell, suddenly agitated. “Say something!”

“Why?” Cara asked. It was the only word she could think of. “Why… all this?”

Jayden looked up at her. His eyes blazed. “You rebs are murdering our planet. Something had to be done. Capridor endures!” He practically shouted the slogan, as if expecting his fellow prisoners to echo it, but none of them did.

“Not us,” Cara said. “I understand why you attacked the barracks. But _your own people?_ Why? Why’d you kill… them?” She had been about to ask _Why did you kill Yannik,_ but she wouldn’t speak his name. Not here, not in front of these murderers. They didn’t deserve it.

“Traitors.” Jayden scowled. “Giving aid to the enemy. We had to teach them a lesson. The people of Capridor have to stand united against the tyranny of the New Republic, or we will fall separately.”

“But someone turned you in,” Cara pointed out. “You’ve all been scheduled for execution.”

Jayden hesitated. “Then we will be martyrs,” he said. “Our deaths will light the fire of revolution. You think we’re the only Sons on the planet? Hah! There are millions of us waiting to strike. We’re in every city.”

Cara searched his face for some truth, some deeper meaning. She found nothing but bluster and bravado. He clearly believed every single word he was saying. _Young people always believe themselves invincible_ , she thought. _I did._

“Are they really going to kill us?” Jayden asked. Just for a moment, he looked like a boy again, a boy wearing a cape that was too big for him, going to war with a stick for a lightsaber.

Cara nodded. “At dawn tomorrow. Do you have a message for your family, at least? I’ll pass it along.”

“Tell them… tell them I died for our freedom,” the boy said. “Tell them Capridor endures.” His voice broke on the last syllable. Cara stared at him for a moment longer, then turned to go.

She wasn’t sure where she was going until her feet took her there. She crossed the plaza again, entered the hospital, walked past the guards and the medical droids and the scurrying orderlies. She descended a flight of ferrocrete steps, following the signs, until she reached an arched metal doorway. _Morgue_ , it said across the top. Cara pushed the doors open and stepped inside.

This room was cool, at least ten degrees colder than the corridor outside. Sterile glowstrips set in the ceiling provided blue-tinged illumination. One wall was given over to a rack of person-sized drawers. A chemical stink hung in the air, the whiff of preservatives and cleansing acids, masking the faint scent of decay. In one corner, a 2-1D droid slumped over, deactivated.

A dozen slabs jutted up from the floor, each one made of brushed metal. Ten of them had bodies on them. Cara walked between the rows, looking each corpse in the eyes. The coroner had done good work. They’d been stripped, cleaned, their horrible wounds sewn shut, their faces made up to restore a semblance of life. They looked peaceful now, their eyes closed. Governor, barmaid, fisherman… whatever they’d been in life, they now lay side to side in perfect equality.

She stopped next to Yannik’s slab. Only now did she see how far his tattoos went. They spiraled up his arms and across his chest, stopping short of his neck and descending towards his navel. Some of the shapes towards the bottom were half-completed or only partially filled in: whales, sea serpents, brightly plumed birds. He had been a work in progress, it seemed. Now it would never be finished.

“Yannik,” she began, and stopped, startled into silence by the sound of her own voice. It seemed very loud in the confines of the room.

“Yannik, they found the men who killed you. They’re prisoners now. They’re going to be executed in the morning.”

Yannik lay unmoving. His flesh was pale and smooth. Cara laid one hand on his. _Cold, he’s so cold_.

“I’m going to do it, Yannik. I’m on the firing squad. I know you wouldn’t be happy about that. I’m not happy either.”

He said nothing. There was nothing to say.

“One of them is a boy, Yannik. A child. I mean, they’re all young, but he’s…” her voice trailed off. She closed her eyes. “I hate this so much. I told you hated it last time we talked, and it’s worse now. I don’t know what to do. I wish I could ask you. That’s ironic, isn’t it? You’re the one person in the galaxy I’d trust right now to tell me what to do.”

A memory swam up from the depths of her mind. “Love should be cherished,” Yannik said, a breeze toying with his hair. “It sleeps in all of us, and its waking is a terrible sweet thunder.”

Cara bent over and kissed him for the first and last time, on the forehead. His skin was cold and dry beneath her lips. She tasted salt.


	10. Epilogue

Pell Rutledge was one of Nature’s early risers. Almost nobody in the barracks got up sooner than he did. He liked that time in the morning, his little slice of solitude: it let him brew caf (nobody else in the platoon could brew worth a damn) and reflect. This morning, it might give him a chance to put his thoughts in order. He wished they’d pushed the execution back a bit. Dawn was nicely symbolic, but it was too early for something like this.

It took him a while to realize that he wasn’t the first person to wake up today. His squad had claimed one of the bunkrooms in the constabulary, presumably where officers slept when they had back to back shifts. It was, if anything, more cramped and uncomfortable than the barracks bunkhall had been. In such tight quarters, it was easy to tell when someone’s bunk was empty. 

“Cara?” he said, blinking blearily as he stumbled into the break room. Maybe she’d decided to get an early caf. He didn’t blame her. Firing squad duty was nasty business.

She wasn’t here, either. Nor was she in the refresher, or in any of the hallways. By now, other troopers were starting to shift awake, and Pell was getting a little worried. She’d come back the night before, right? Of course she had, but she’d seemed distracted. Not that he could blame her.

He walked past his bed and something caught his eye. It was a note, a little piece of paper. He’d almost missed it because it was the same color as his bedsheet. It had been left under his pillow, by the look of it. He grabbed it and unfolded it.

_Pell,_

_I’m sorry. I wanted to say goodbye, but I didn’t want to get you in trouble. You were right. This is a war. It’s not the war I signed up for, though, and it’s not a war I believe in. I can’t do this._

_Maybe I’ll see you again someday. I hope so. Until then, Pell, don’t forget what we fought for. Don’t become what we hate. And don’t get caught._

_Love always,_

_Cara_

Pell read the note twice, blinking in disbelief. “Cara…” he muttered under his breath. He shook his head and jammed the crumpled note into his pocket, then went looking for a working caf machine.

\---

At the spaceport, one of the alarm tripwires buzzed and sparked. It had been cut through neatly, but whoever had done so had taken care to short-circuit it first. The tripwire blared its warning, but the short neatly swallowed it up. At the security booth, Trooper Jarrith put up his feet and sighed obliviously.

And in low orbit, an X-wing continued to climb. Its ascent was unsteady, as though the hand at the stick was less than comfortable, but it leveled out after a moment. _Mon Ekidna_ broadcast an automated query, and the X-wing responded in kind with the day’s duty codes. _Ekidna_ , satisfied, turned its attention away from the little snubfighter. There were bigger fish to fry.

In the cockpit, Cara Dune laboriously punched in her destination coordinates, one digit at a time. She’d deployed to Utrium once before and found it a perfectly wretched little mudball, a hive of scum and villainy that made Nar Shaddaa look respectable. That suited her purposes perfectly well. The New Republic would come looking for a missing X-wing, of course, but she had no intention of keeping it. She just needed transport offworld, and she could already think of a dozen ways to scrape up the credits for that.

The rest would be up to her.

**THE END**


End file.
